Just one word about country morality. It is customary to deplore the influence of large cities on the young. Of late, however, there has been a tendency to question whether, after all, sex morality is apt to be higher in the country than in the city. Parents and teachers in small towns and in rural districts will do well to take an inventory of the influences surrounding their children. It will always be impossible to give country children city diversions. One great disadvantage of country children frequently counter-acts the beneficial influence of out-of-door living; namely, isolation. The city child is practically always in or about to be in the sight of, if not in the presence of, other people. Numbers and close contact with people, though they be strangers, mean restraint and pervading social conscience. City children find it difficult to have good times in pairs. No amount of instruction of rural pupils in sex hygiene will take the place of amusements and entertainments for groups of children, forming thus a special antidote for "two's company, three's a crowd." Liberating and standardizing normal intersex relations and discouraging cramped social intersex relations are more urgent needs than instruction in sex diseases. A working environment that permits pure-mindedness will do more to inculcate a reverence for sex cleanliness and for parenthood than lectures and essays on moral prophylaxis. CHAPTER XL THE ELEMENT OF TRUTH IN QUACKERY; HYGIENE OF THE MIND Patent medicines and other forms of quackery could not pay such enormous dividends unless there was some truth in their claims; unless their victim found some beneficial return for his money. They win confidence because they raise hopes and combat fear. They do cure thousands of people of fear and of "ingrowing thoughts." In so doing they remove the sole cause of much disability.[17] In so doing they are merely applying by wholesale principles of mental hygiene that are legitimately used by physicians, tradesmen, teachers, and parents who deal successfully with nervousness.