the imaginings of ignorance." In America, also, where at an
annual meeting of the American Medical Association, Dr. Denslow
Lewis, of Chicago, eloquently urged the need of teaching sexual
hygiene to youths and girls, all the subsequent nine speakers,
some of them physicians of worldwide fame, expressed their
essential agreement (_Medico-Legal Journal_, June-Sept., 1903).
Howard, again, at the end of his elaborate _History of
Matrimonial Institutions_ (vol. iii, p. 257) asserts the
necessity for education in matters of sex, as going to the root
of the marriage problem. "In the future educational programme,"
he remarks, "sex questions must hold an honorable place."

While, however, it is now widely recognized that children are entitled to
sexual enlightenment, it cannot be said that this belief is widely put
into practice. Many persons, who are fully persuaded that children should
sooner or later be enlightened concerning the sexual sources of life, are
somewhat nervously anxious as to the precise age at which this
enlightenment should begin. Their latent feeling seems to be that sex is
an evil, and enlightenment concerning sex also an evil, however necessary,
and that the chief point is to ascertain the latest moment to which we can
safely postpone this necessary evil. Such an attitude is, however,
altogether wrong-headed. The child's desire for knowledge concerning the
origin of himself is a perfectly natural, honest, and harmless desire, so
long as it is not perverted by being thwarted. A child of four may ask
questions on this matter, simply and spontaneously. As soon as the
questions are put, certainly as soon as they become at all insistent, they
should be answered, in the same simple and spontaneous spirit, truthfully,
though according to the measure of the child's intelligence and his
capacity and desire for knowledge. This period should not, and, if these
indications are followed, naturally would not, in any case, be delayed