Note BR — Chapter XIX · HYGIENE OF CHILDHOOD

This course will mean a much larger task than merely lobbying a bill through the legislature for the eradication of prostitution, the common remedy of the reformer. It will come only by the slowest and most difficult of processes and by that hardest of all work in the world, i. e., thinking.

The off-hand reformers are too impatient with the slow and toilsome process of competent and judicious sex-education. For them a law, forbidding the marriage of the diseased, suffices to eradicate hereditary syphilis and ophthalmia neonatorum. As a rule, their laws often intensify the very ills they seek to cure. To the average reformer life is presented in a stark and rigid outline. He has no perception of proportions, no knowledge of values. Even when he acquiesce in the slow, patient, laborious study of sex, he is blandly unconscious of distinctions. He at once exaggerates matters. He can not see that the truth about sex may be imparted to the child by parents, family physician or teacher, but that it cannot be acquired by the child from the platform, stage, novel or the ubiquitous magazine.