Parents shirk and evade the natural inquiries of their children; very often no kind of answer is given to their young searchings for the truth. In other cases foolish fictions that outrage even a child’s intelligence are repeated, and falsehood piled upon falsehood. For it is one condition of a lie that it can never stand alone; and when a mother has lied to her child once, she is compelled to weave a network of falsehood to sustain her first false statement. She must go on from one foolish evasion to worse untruths to keep up appearances. Every story which, like that of the stork or the gooseberry bush, rests upon a lie, is an outrage to the child. And the mother’s authority stands upon a veritable quicksand, for the day will come when the child will not believe her. A careless word may be spoken by a servant, a companion, or some other, and, if the mother has not saved herself in time, she will be discovered by her child as a liar. The whole structure of her pretence and shameful evasions will totter and fall to ruin. And with it must go her power to influence her child. Barriers of doubts and silence are raised which, as time goes on, more and more will separate the child from the parent. And such barriers once set up can hardly ever be broken through. An embarrassing sense of shame, rising like a poisonous gas between mother and child, will work death to any confidence. How many mothers have been forced in bitterness to cry, “I lied to my child. I concealed the truth year after year. Now my child turns from me, and no longer has faith in me or in my words.” And this failure of duty on the part of the mother works unknown harm to the child. That is the essential point. Do our children remain in ignorance of the facts of sex which we, in our fear, fail to teach them? No, they do not. Girls and boys in tens of thousands take the course of action threatened by the child Wendla—they go and learn from others what their mothers have refused to tell them. Few children fail to discover, either through their own intelligence or by some information they gain at school or from servants, some kind of sexual information. Thus too often they glean their first knowledge of sex from the vulgar, ignorant lips of the prurient. I marvel at the blindness of parents, who seem unable to approach this question with even common understanding. Nine children out of ten gain information upon the relations of the sexes in the worst possible way. Fortunate is the child who escapes the contamination of ignorant indecency.