The real failure in sexual education arises from our treatment of sex as something apart from the rest of life. We have got to change this, if we are to help our children. Sex must cease to be a forbidden subject. Label any natural function as improper, not to be spoken about and repellent, and at once you set up an abnormal curiosity, and open a way for almost every evil. We must cease to be afraid. There is, of course, a very deep reason for this fear of sex. The sex impulses are not often realised and understood in the conscious life of men and women, and although they can be caught up and fused into all that is best in the individual character, they remain in most of us unrecognised and untamed. You will see what I mean. The sex instinct has retained its wildness, and we must, I think, face the fact that there is in all of us a volcanic element in sex, underlying and influencing all the rest of our nature, and, for that very reason, shaking the individual character from its foundations with tremor, if not with catastrophe. This distrust of the dynamic force, which so often we have found difficult to control in ourselves, causes us to fear for our children. We are afraid that many growths we do not like may spring up in them. And the immediate result in us is an inhibitory awkwardness—largely an effort of hiding—in the face of everything that comes within hailing distance of the sex passion. Until we have cleared our thoughts from this confusion of fear, very little good can be done. Let us purify ourselves and re-establish our own faith. When once we come to understand, we cannot go on leaving our children to be sullied, and in some cases—and those not a few—even crushed and destroyed by our mock modesty, sham decencies and complacent blindness. It is my firm conviction that most of the perversions of sex, a whole list of diseases, the almost countless number of unhappy marriages, many of the existing social evils—may be traced back to this cause. It is unsafe to prophesy, yet I think much of the misery would be remedied, if once we could dispel the unwholesome mystery with which we, in our timidity and uncleanness of mind, have enveloped the facts of birth and the relations between the sexes. Such mystery is really nothing but shame; much of it may be dispelled by the wholesome light of simple and wise teaching. So only can we hope to guide our children’s natural and beautiful unfolding. We must inculcate in them from their earliest years respect for their own bodies and for the reproductive act.