The kiss, made common, is ridiculous. To be worth anything, it must speak exclusively the language of a pure, changeless affection, such as is represented in the love of God for his children. It belongs more to the parent and child, brother and sister, than to friend and companion. It is, as before intimated, fraternal, not social. As soon as any attempt is made to drag it into society, it becomes disgusting, and is always soon driven out by storms of ridicule. Therefore good form has taken it in hand, and has determined its sphere and office with the most arbitrary insistence. And again the voice of society is but an echo of the voice of truth and purity. Good form has decreed that the kiss, public and indiscriminate, is either an indication of unmitigated rusticity, of shameless immorality, or is to be understood as a joke,—very funny on its first spontaneous utterance, but very flat if repeated. Indulged in private, outside the sacred boundaries of the family, between men and women, it is unpardonable,—unatonable, at least as far as the woman is concerned. Good form requires that every young lady shall be so well trained that she will keep her lips absolutely untouched for her husband, _after_ the words have been spoken that make him her husband. The “betrothal kiss” of the romancer has been brought under suspicion in real life by the fact that betrothal is, in our day, not by any means equivalent to marriage; and the young man who knows the world, and yet sufficiently regards truth and purity to seek them in a wife, would vastly prefer to find his lady friend rigidly determined to keep her lips to herself as long as they two are yet twain, rather than to find them always at even his command. In the correspondence that has come to me as a result of “Studies in Home and Child Life,” is to be found pitiful evidence of the ignorance in which young people are allowed to grow up, even in a matter which may seem, like this one, trivial and bordering on the ridiculous. The habit among children of kissing everybody is little short of vicious. Kissing games of every description are considered vulgar, anywhere outside the immediate family circle, and even then, because of the trend of habit, they are not good form. There is great possibility of infection in the kiss. The remains of old teeth, the breath and lips of those who are in any wise diseased, make kissing dangerous. It is well-nigh impossible to find a clean, sweet mouth in these days of human degeneracy; and because of these facts the little children are exposed to every malignant disorder that is afloat, and many that are hidden deep in the foul cisterns of the broken-down body of grandparents, father, mother, and the strangers who straggle in and use their “rights” on the freely rendered lips of the little innocents.