But the emergence of women has had another significant effect, namely: an increase in frankness concerning extra-legal sexual relations, if not in their number. Of late there has been much public discussion of the wantonness of our modern youth; which, being interpreted, means the disposition of our girls to take the same liberty of indulgence in pre-nuptial sexual affairs that has always been countenanced in boys. This tendency is an entirely natural result of woman’s increased freedom. The conditions of economic and social life have undergone revolutionary change in the past half-century; and codes of morals always yield before economic and social exigency, for this is imperious. It is for this reason, as Dr. A. Maude Royden has acutely observed, that women of the lower classes have always enjoyed a certain immunity from the taboos that reduced women of the middle and upper classes to virtual slavery. “If among the poor,” says Dr. Royden, “these ‘protections’ have been dispensed with, it has not been because the poor have thought either better or worse of their women, but merely because they are too poor to dispense with their labour, and labour demands some small degree of freedom.” Labour not only demands, it gives freedom. The woman who is economically independent need no longer observe rules based on male dominance; hence the new candour in woman’s attitude towards the awe-inspiring fetich of sex. If there is about this attitude an element of bravado, akin to that of the youth who thinks it clever and smart to carry a hip-pocket flask, it bears testimony, not to the dangers of freedom, but to the bankruptcy of conventional morality. The worst effect of tutelage is that it negates self-discipline, and therefore people suddenly released from it are almost bound to make fools of themselves. The women who are emerging from it, if they have not learned to substitute an enlightened self-interest for the morality of repression, are certainly in danger of carrying sexual freedom to dishevelling extremes, simply to demonstrate to themselves their emancipation from unjust conventions. There is no reason to expect that women, emerging from tutelage, will be wiser than men. One should expect the contrary. It is necessary to grow accustomed to freedom before one may walk in it sure-footedly. “Everything,” says Goethe, “which frees our spirit without increasing our self-control, is deteriorating.” This so-called wantonness, this silly bravado, simply shows that the new freedom is a step ahead of the self-discipline that will eventually take the place of surveillance and repression. It would not be so, perhaps, if girls and boys had ever been enlightened concerning the real sins of sex, and their true consequences. Women, in the past, have been taught to keep virgin or chaste for the sake of their reputations, of their families, of their chances in the marriage-market; they have been scared into chastity in