she went regularly every day to carry the household bread and beer to your
master. When in your turn you marry and have a child, bring up your child
as your mother brought you up."[20]

I take it for granted, however, that--whatever doubt there may be as to
the how or the when--no doubt is any longer possible as to the absolute
necessity of taking deliberate and active part in this sexual initiation,
instead of leaving it to the chance revelation of ignorant and perhaps
vicious companions or servants. It is becoming more and more widely felt
that the risks of ignorant innocence are too great.

"All the love and solicitude parental yearning can bestow,"
writes Dr. G.F. Butler, of Chicago (_Love and its Affinities_,
1899, p. 83), "all that the most refined religious influence can
offer, all that the most cultivated associations can accomplish,
in one fatal moment may be obliterated. There is no room for
ethical reasoning, indeed oftentimes no consciousness of wrong,
but only Margaret's 'Es war so süss'." The same writer adds (as
had been previously remarked by Mrs. Craik and others) that among
church members it is the finer and more sensitive organizations
that are the most susceptible to sexual emotions. So far as boys
are concerned, we leave instruction in matters of sex, the most
sacred and central fact in the world, as Canon Lyttelton remarks,
to "dirty-minded school-boys, grooms, garden-boys, anyone, in
short, who at an early age may be sufficiently defiled and
sufficiently reckless to talk of them." And, so far as girls are
concerned, as Balzac long ago remarked, "a mother may bring up
her daughter severely, and cover her beneath her wings for
seventeen years; but a servant-girl can destroy that long work by
a word, even by a gesture."