No less than seventy years ago, a profound but neglected thinker, George Drysdale, emphasized the necessity of a thorough understanding of man’s sexual nature in approaching economic, political and social problems.  “Before we can undertake the calm and impartial investigation of any social problem, we must first of all free ourselves from all those sexual prejudices which are so vehement and violent and which so completely distort our vision of the external world.  Society as a whole has yet to fight its way through an almost impenetrable forest of sexual taboos.”  Drysdale’s words have lost none of their truth even to-day:  “There are few things from which humanity has suffered more than the degraded and irreverent feelings of mystery and shame that have been attached to the genital and excretory organs.  The former have been regarded, like their corresponding mental passions, as something of a lower and baser nature, tending to degrade and carnalize man by their physical appetites.  But we cannot take a debasing view of any part of our humanity without becoming degraded in our whole being."(7)

Drysdale moreover clearly recognized the social crime of entrusting to sexual barbarians the duty of legislating and enforcing laws detrimental to the welfare of all future generations.  “They trust blindly to authority for the rules they blindly lay down,” he wrote, “perfectly unaware of the awful and complicated nature of the subject they are dealing with so confidently and of the horrible evils their unconsidered statements are attended with.  They themselves break through the most fundamentally important laws daily in utter unconsciousness of the misery they are causing to their fellows....”

Psychologists to-day courageously emphasize the integral relationship of the expression of the sexual instinct with every phase of human activity.  Until we recognize this central fact, we cannot understand the implications and the sinister significance of superficial attempts to apply rosewater remedies to social evils,—­by the enactment of restrictive and superficial legislation, by wholesale philanthropies and charities, by publicly burying our heads in the sands of sentimentality.  Self-appointed censors, grossly immoral “moralists,” makeshift legislators, all face a heavy responsibility for the miseries, diseases, and social evils they perpetuate or intensify by enforcing the primitive taboos of aboriginal customs, traditions, and outworn laws, which at every step hinder the education of the people in the scientific knowledge of their sexual nature.  Puritanic and academic taboo of sex in education and religion is as disastrous to human welfare as prostitution or the venereal scourges.  “We are compelled squarely to face the distorting influences of biologically aborted reformers as well as the wastefulness of seducers,” Dr. Edward A. Kempf recently declared.  “Man arose from the ape and inherited his passions, which he can only refine but dare not attempt to castrate