And so it was that I wrote the manuscript which is now printed in the following pages.  I did not write it at first just as it now stands, because experience showed me, from time to time, where my first efforts could be modified and improved.  So what is here presented is the result of many practical demonstrations of the real working value of what the manuscript contains.

My method of using the copy has been something as follows:  As I have already suggested, what I have written has been prepared for the sole and express purpose of helping husbands and wives to live sane and wholesome sex-lives—­to give them the requisite knowledge for so doing; knowledge of themselves and of each other as sexual beings; the correct ideas regarding such right manner of living; to disabuse their minds of wrong sex-teaching, or no teaching at all, of ignorance, or prudery, or carelessness, or lust—­in a word, to get to them the things that all sane married people ought to know, and to help them to practice these things, to the best of their several abilities.

(Perhaps I ought to say that there is not a line of what I have written that deals with the subject of venereal diseases, any of them.  This field is already so well covered by a literature especially devoted to this subject that it needs no word of mine to make it as satisfactory as possible, as far as discoveries regarding the same have progressed.  My attempt is toward making marriage more of a success than it now is, under existing conditions; and we all know that there is a limitless field for exploration and exploitation right there.)

Speaking somewhat generally, I have found what I have written to be of special value to two classes of my patrons:  First, to the “newly-weds”; and, second, to those who have been married for a longer or shorter period, and who “have not got on well together.”  A word or two regarding each of these: 

It is a wise old saying that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” and in no other experience of life is this so true as in the ills to which married people are peculiarly subject.  Many a newly wedded couple have wrecked the possibilities of happiness of a life time on their “honeymoon trip”; and it is a matter of common knowledge to the members of our profession that the great majority of brides are practically raped on their entrance into the married relation.  Further than this, we all know that these things are as they are chiefly because of the ignorance of the parties concerned, rather than because they deliberately meant to do wrong.  They were left to travel, alone and unguided, over what was to them an unknown way, one that was beset with pitfalls and precipices, and where dangers lurked in every forward step they took.  It is to these that I have found what I have written to be a great help at the time of their utmost need; and the thanks I have received from such parties have been beyond the power of words to express.