however, opinion is rapidly growing more enlightened.  In England little or no progress has yet been made, but in America steps are being taken in this direction, as by the Chicago Society for Social Hygiene.  It must, indeed, be said that those who oppose the sexual enlightenment of youth in large cities are directly allying themselves, whether or not they know it, with the influences that make for vice and immorality.

Such lectures are also given to girls on leaving school, not only girls of the well-to-do, but also those of the poor class, who need them fully as much, and in some respects more.  Thus Dr. A. Heidenhain has published a lecture (Sexuelle Belehrung der aus den Volksschule entlassenen Maedchen, 1907), accompanied by anatomical tables, which he has delivered to girls about to leave school, and which is intended to be put into their hands at this time.  Salvat, in a Lyons thesis (La Depopulation de la France, 1903), insists that the hygiene of pregnancy and the care of infants should form part of the subject of such lectures.  These subjects might well be left, however, to a somewhat later period.

Something is clearly needed beyond lectures on these matters.  It should be the business of the parents or other guardians of every adolescent youth and girl to arrange that, once at least at this period of life, there should be a private, personal interview with a medical man to afford an opportunity for a friendly and confidential talk concerning the main points of sexual hygiene.  The family doctor would be the best for this duty because he would be familiar with the personal temperament of the youth and the family tendencies.[37] In the case of girls a woman doctor would often be preferred.  Sex is properly a mystery; and to the unspoilt youth, it is instinctively so; except in an abstract and technical form it cannot properly form the subject of lectures.  In a private and individualized conversation between the novice in life and the expert, it is possible to say many necessary things that could not be said in public, and it is possible, moreover, for the youth to ask questions which shyness and reserve make it impossible to put to parents, while the convenient opportunity of putting them naturally to the expert otherwise seldom or never occurs.  Most youths have their own special ignorances, their own special difficulties, difficulties and ignorances that could sometimes be resolved by a word.  Yet it by no means infrequently happens that they carry them far on into adult life because they have lacked the opportunity, or the skill and assurance to create the opportunity, of obtaining enlightenment.

It must be clearly understood that these talks are of medical, hygienic, and physiological character; they are not to be used for retailing moral platitudes.  To make them that would be a fatal mistake.  The young are often very hostile to merely conventional moral maxims, and suspect their hollowness, not always without reason.  The end to be aimed at here is enlightenment.  Certainly knowledge can never be immoral, but nothing is gained by jumbling up knowledge and morality together.