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 unless he would destroy the fountains
of energy that maintain civilization and make life worth living and the
world worth beautifying.... We do not have a problem that is to be solved
by making repressive laws and executing them. Nothing will be more
disastrous. Society must make life worth the living and the refining for
the individual by conditioning him to love and to seek the love-object
in a manner that reflects a constructive effect upon his fellow-men
and by giving him suitable opportunities. The virility of the automatic
apparatus is destroyed by excessive gormandizing or hunger, by excessive
wealth or poverty, by excessive work or idleness, by sexual abuse or
intolerant prudishness. The noblest and most difficult art of all is the
raising of human thoroughbreds."(8)

(1) It may be well to note, in this connection, that the
decline in the birth rate among the more intelligent classes