Let me not be misunderstood. I have no wish to draw down the blinds again upon vital questions of sex, to bring out once more the comfortable "wraps" of Victorian days, to uphold reserve if not silence, or shut the door upon open talk. Nor would I say to youth: "We are older and _therefore_ we know; believe us, things were far better and happier in our time." Such a reproach were neither wise nor true. Human nature, like all forms of life, always grows and improves (in a long view), steps on towards the Ideal. But to-day we must face the sharp arrest of all normal progress, the actual throw-back to savagery, caused by the war: which came, as a moral influence, upon minds unsettled by the Revolution of Ideas that had set in before 1914. Revolution may, and in fact does, largely express itself by exaggeration, but it is not Anarchy. The ideas then first revealed were due to a natural and healthy awakening among advanced thinkers. Winds blew upon our comfortable complacencies. The moral assumptions we had accepted, and refused to discuss, were boldly questioned. The Sex-Revolt had begun. And rightly. Many reforms were badly needed in the legal applications of morality; the ideal of purity had stiffened into conventions that chained the mind and stifled the heart. There was a taint of insincerity over the realities of life: the false gods of narrow-minded respectability, breeding secret sin. Wider knowledge; the sifting of old ideas and the questioning of fixed thought, can harm none. On the whole, moreover, protest was made in earnest, with a due sense of responsibility. It was not, as to-day, wildly shouted on the housetops; without reflection, undigested; in a riot of burning words. There were, of course, wild statements made in bitter anger; foolish experiments attempted; in some quarters, merely a new cant and upside-down convention upheld to replace the old. But, on the whole, still only among the few. In all probability, under normal conditions, the needed frank discussion and honest thought would have sifted the true from the false, before the temporary confusion had inflamed popular imagination, and uprooted, without reforming, the habits and thought of daily life. Looking back, I think, one can fairly summarize the position then arrived at by advanced thinkers, that was beginning to be generally discussed: That there is nothing inherently evil in the human body, to be hidden up, and if possible ignored; particularly, that the instincts of sex are natural and healthy, a vital part of pure love. That women are moved by physical "desires" equally with men, though more habituated to restraint; wherefore the old one-sided tolerance towards men, "who cannot help themselves," is utterly false and, combined with the conventional innocence of women, creates morbid barriers between the sexes, whereby "the woman pays."