In this way infinite injury has been done to the whole human stock, and more particularly women have suffered from the dishonesty and the inherent incapacity of our society to be frank and truthful about the most profound and the most terrible aspects of sex, namely, its diseases. A wife or a mother has the right to be told the truth. Women, and particularly mothers, have been outrageously wronged by the deliberate lies and untruthful atmosphere about the greater problems of sex in which the learned have enshrouded them: but mothers have themselves given the first bent to the little sprouting twig of that tree of knowledge, and they have bent it _away_ from the sunlight of truth and clean and happy understanding. The mother’s excuse is, or would be if she felt herself in any way to blame (which, by the way, deplorably, she very seldom does) that these terrible mysteries of origin are not suitable for the little innocent child to ponder over. She thinks they would shock him. But here the mother is profoundly mistaken. _The age of innocence is the age when all knowledge is pure._ At three, four, or five years old, everything is taken for granted--everything in the universe is equally a surprise, and is at the same time accepted without question as being in the natural course of events. If true answers were given to the tiny child’s questions, they would seem quite rational--not in the least more surprising than the fact that oak trees grow from acorns, or that the cook gets a jam tart out of a hot oven. All the world’s events seem magic at that age, and if no exceptional mystery were made of the magic of his own advent, the child would feel it as natural as all the rest, and having asked the question and obtained satisfactory, simple unaccentuated answers, would let his little mind run on to the thousand other questions he wants to ask. The essential racial knowledge would slip naturally and sweetly into his mind mingled with a myriad other new impressions. There is no self-consciousness, no personal shamefacedness, about a tiny child. It accepts the great truths of the universe in the grand manner. If the mother has never failed her child, has always given it what she could of wisdom, she will retain his trust and his confidence. When he gets a little older she can teach him to go to no one else for talk about the intimacies of life, which the child is quick to realize are not discussed openly amongst strangers. Then, later on, when personal consciousness and shyness begin, there need not be the acute constraint and tension of the shame-faced elder speaking to a mind awakening to itself. Deep in the child’s consciousness, deeper even than its conscious memory goes, the true big facts are planted. To tell a child of twelve or fourteen the truth is, for most parents, an impossibly difficult matter. The reason for this is that it is then too late for essentials; only details are then suitable or necessary.