Then, besides this more general teaching, it is also highly necessary that those in question should have some knowledge of the use and guardianship of their own sex-functions. If the youth and girl whom we have supposed as about to be married had been brought up in almost any tribe of savages, they would a few years previously have gone through regular offices of initiation into manhood and womanhood, during which time ceremonies (possibly indecent in our eyes) would at any rate have made many misapprehensions impossible. As it is, the civilised girl is led to the 'altar;' often in uttermost ignorance and misunderstanding as to the nature of the sacrificial rites about to be consummated. The youth too (does it not seem strange?) has never been taught how to use the female in this most important moment of their joint lives. Perhaps he is unaware that love in the female is, in a sense, more diffused than in the male, less specially sexual; that it dwells longer in caresses and embraces, and determines itself more slowly towards the reproductive system. Impatient, he injures and horrifies his partner, and unconsciously perhaps aggravates the very hysterical tendency which marriage might and should have allayed.* Among the middle and well-to-do classes especially, the conditions of high civilisation, by inducing an overfed masculinity in the males and a nervous and hysterical tendency in the females,** increase the difficulties mentioned; and it is among the 'classes' too that public opinion, largely by repressing the utterance and ignoring the existence of sex-feeling, has created the special evils of sex-starvation and sex-ignorance on the one hand, and of mere licentiousness on the other. * It must be remembered too that to many women (though of course by no means a majority) the thought of Sex brings little sense of pleasure, and the fulfilment of its duties constitutes a real, even though a willing, sacrifice. ** Thus Bebel in his book on Woman speaks of "the idle and luxuriant life of so many women in the upper classes, the nervous stimulant afforded by exquisite perfumes, the over- dosing with poetry, music, the stage--which is regarded as the chief means of education, and is the chief occupation, of a sex already suffering from hypertrophy of nerves and sensibility."