Revealing the science of propagation to the child-boy is, after all, only the first step toward unfolding the many facts of sex--facts that are made mysteries through the inexcusable selfishness--or modesty, if you prefer to call it that--of mothers and fathers. If sealing the secrets of sex is an injustice to the boy of six, it is a scarlet sin against the youth of sixteen. At six he is looking at life curiously from the family dooryard--within the mother’s call; but at sixteen or soon thereafter, he strides out into the street, marches down the highway and turns the corner. He is on the firing-line. Now comes a crisis in the boy’s life so acute, so grave that I approach the subject with trepidation. My poor pen, tempered by that delicacy demanded of printed words, seems incapable of the task before me. And I approach it also with reverence because I look upon it as an almost divine privilege to be permitted to discuss with an army of mothers a problem which I regard as the great tragedy of American youth. * * * * * Nature is good, Nature is provident, but above all Nature is self-preservative. Go to your naturalists, your entomologists, and they will all tell you that the law of perpetuation is first and foremost among all living things. Man is no exception. Your boy, just coming into his maturity, is in this respect like unto all other growing things that God has made. As he ripens toward manhood this instinct becomes more manifest within him. Vaguely, perhaps, he recognises its import, but in the main it is a mystery. In a general way he may reason out its purpose; but how can he know its humanised limitations? How can he know that the refining process of civilisation has demanded a check upon the exercise of Nature’s functions? And--here is the vital issue--how shall he know of the dread penalties Nature sometimes exacts when these restraints are violated? Why is it that the loving father and mother, who labour with him and watch over him and shield him through childhood, decline to raise a finger of warning against the grim spectre of disease that stalks behind the painted faces of the underworld? Must it be written, to the shame of human parenthood, that the very horror of this evil stays the warning hand? Or does the mother fall into that too common error of thinking that this evil of evils is open to every boy but her own? Then listen to this, which I quote from an eminent authority: “Take a group of one hundred young men--those from eighteen to twenty-five years of age--and seventy-five of these will be found to be suffering either from the effects of venereal diseases or still in an acute stage of one of them.” Mothers, let not your eyes be blinded to a condition that medical records have proven to be a fact. It may be your boy and it may be mine.