+Economic Forces Opposing Sexual Self-control.+—­In the first place, while continence, or abstinence from sexual relations, is a valuable ideal in its place, it cannot be indefinitely extended with benefit either to the individual or to the race.  The instinct to reproduce is as fundamental as the instinct of self-preservation and the desire for food.  A social order which disregards it or defies it will meet defeat.  To an alarming extent the tendency of the present economic system is to create unsocial impulses by making the normal gratification of sexual instinct in marriage and the assumption of the responsibility of a family more and more difficult.  The cost of living is steadily rising without a corresponding certainty on the part of a large proportion of young men that they can meet it for themselves, to say nothing of meeting it for wife and children.  The uncertainties of a ‘job’ are often serious enough to discourage the rashest of men from depending on a variable earning power to help him do his share for the advancement of the race.  It will be an impossible task to convince even naturally clean-minded, healthy young men and women that they should live a life of hopeless virtue because it is part of the divine order that they should be so held down by hard times and small earnings as to make marrying and having children an unattainable luxury.  Continence and clean living as preparations for decent and reasonably early marriage and the raising of a healthy family are the highest of ideals, and ought to be preached from every housetop.  Continence as a life-long punishment for the impossible demands of an oppressive social and economic order gets as little attention as it deserves.  First, let us make a clean sexual life lead with greater certainty to some of the rewards that make life worth living and we shall then have a more substantial basis for making continence before marriage other than empty words.  If every father, for example, could say to his sons and daughters that if they showed themselves clean men and women he would back them in an early marriage, there would be an appreciable decrease in the amount of young manhood which is now squandered on indecency.  If every employer, or the state itself, would give a clean marriage a preferred position in the social and economic scale, and, by helping to meet the cost of it, recognize in a substantial way the value to the race of a family of vigorous children, an important factor in youthful sexual laxity would be robbed of its power.  No one will assert that such remedial proposals are of themselves cure-alls for present evils, but they must have at least an emphatic place in the future of moral prophylaxis.