both by teachers and mothers, the National and State Federations of Women’s Clubs are gradually preparing thousands of women throughout America for fuller co-operation with the schools in this difficult matter.  In this, as in so many other educational movements, Germany has led the way.  Two publications are issued monthly in Berlin, which promote not only more effective legislation but more adequate instruction in the schools on this basic subject.  These journals are supported by men and women anxious for light for the sake of their children.  Some of them were first stirred to action by Wedekind’s powerful drama “The Awakening of Spring,” which, with Teutonic grimness, thrusts over the footlights the lesson that death and degradation may be the fate of a group of gifted school-children, because of the cowardly reticence of their parents.

A year ago the Bishop of London gathered together a number of influential people and laid before them his convictions that the root of the social evil lay in so-called “parental modesty,” and that in the quickening of the parental conscience lay the hope for the “lifting up of England’s moral tone which has for so long been the despair of England’s foremost men.”

In America the eighth year-book of the National Society for the Scientific Study of Education treats of this important subject with great ability, massing the agencies and methods in impressive array.  Many other educational journals and organized societies could be cited as expressing a new conscience in regard to this world-old evil.  The expert educational opinion which they represent is practically agreed that for older children the instruction should not be confined to biology and hygiene, but may come quite naturally in history and literature, which record and portray the havoc wrought by the sexual instinct when uncontrolled, and also show that, when directed and spiritualized, it has become an inspiration to the loftiest devotions and sacrifices.  The youth thus taught sees this primal instinct not only as an essential to the continuance of the race, but also, when it is transmuted to the highest ends, as a fundamental factor in social progress.  The entire subject is broadened out in his mind as he learns that his own struggle is a common experience.  He is able to make his own interpretations and to combat the crude inferences of his patronizing companions.  After all, no young person will be able to control his impulses and to save himself from the grosser temptations, unless he has been put under the sway of nobler influences.  Perhaps we have yet to learn that the inhibitions of character as well as its reinforcements come most readily through idealistic motives.