Nature avenges her betrayed girls, however. For medical authority shows that these youthful unfortunates transmit disease in its most virulent and destructive forms. It is as though all the vital potential of their developing womanhood is perverted to a malign poison, charged with the forces of their blasted youth. * * * * * The Victorian, who brought up her daughters to marry in ignorance of biological fact, went to the other extreme. But it was a far less harmful one than that in vogue to-day. Like that of the child, the immature, susceptible mind of a girl, incapable of apprehending the sex-factor in its true perspective with the other factors of life, becomes unduly dominated by consideration thereof when too early instructed. She is far better left, for so long as is practicable, ignorant or hazy concerning this vital phenomenon, in place of being fully informed, as girls are now-a-days. So that they know all that there is to be known about sex--except its seriousness and sacredness. And divorced from the seriousness and sacredness of Love and Birth--which mere knowledge of biological fact is wholly inadequate to impart--such knowledge of fact presents a crude and bald distortion of the truth; only too often imparting an ugly and demoralising warp to mind and conduct. Ignorance is not Innocence, 'tis true, but it serves the same purpose in safeguarding innocence that clothes do in safeguarding modesty. And for one girl who falls in consequence of innocence, twenty fall from sophistication. Unless masculine traits have been over-developed in her by abnormal training, in which case (as occurs sometimes in the quasi-masculine woman of middle-age) sex-instinct may acquire an unnatural and quasi-masculine insistence, this instinct is, in the normal girl, _responsive_ rather than _initiative_. (Wherein she differs diametrically from the male.) And such natural dormancy may be advantageously preserved by haziness of knowledge, and by the careful surveillance required for protection of immature minds and powers. The bald, matter-of-course view-point of many modern girls with regard to sex, their knowledge of vice, and their cynical acceptance and discussion thereof, as too of the vulgar intrigues of notorious dancers and peeresses, to say nothing of the ugly and debasing personal experiences only too many of them have incurred, are among the evils of the injurious licence at present accorded to young persons.