[97] S. Freud, _Sexual-Probleme_, March, 1908. As Adele Schreiber also points out (_Mutterschutz_, Jan., 1907, p. 30), it is not enough to prove that abstinence is not dangerous; we have to remember that the spiritual and physical energy used up in repressing this mighty instinct often reduces a joyous and energetic nature to a weary and faded shadow. Similarly, Helene Stöcker (_Die Liebe und die Frauen_, p. 105) says: "The question whether abstinence is harmful is, to say the truth, a ridiculous question. One needs to be no nervous specialist to know, as a matter of course, that a life of happy love and marriage is the healthy life, and its complete absence cannot fail to lead to severe psychic depression, even if no direct physiological disturbances can be demonstrated." [98] Max Flesch, "Ehe, Hygine und Sexuelle Moral," _Mutterschutz_, 1905, Heft 7. [99] See the Section on Touch in the fourth volume of these _Studies_. [100] "I have had two years' close experience and connexion with the Trappists," wrote Dr. Butterfield, of Natal (_British Medical Journal_, Sept. 15, 1906, p. 668), "both as medical attendant and as being a Catholic in creed myself. I have studied them and investigated their life, habits and diet, and though I should be very backward in adopting it myself, as not suited to me individually, the great bulk of them are in absolute ideal health and strength, seldom ailing, capable of vast work, mental and physical. Their life is very simple and very regular. A healthier body of men and women, with perfect equanimity of temper--this latter I lay great stress on--it would be difficult to find. Health beams in their eyes and countenance and actions. Only in sickness or prolonged journeys are they allowed any strong foods--meats, eggs, etc.--or any alcohol." [101] Féré, _L'Instinct Sexuel_, second edition, p. 332. [102] Rural life, as we have seen when discussing its relation to sexual precocity, _is_ on one side the reverse of a safeguard against sexual influences. But, on the other hand, in so far as it involves hard work and simple living under conditions that are not nervously stimulating, it is favorable to a considerably delayed sexual activity in youth and to a relative continence. Ammon, in the course of his anthropological investigations of Baden conscripts, found that sexual intercourse was rare in the country before twenty, and even sexual emissions during sleep rare before nineteen or twenty. It is said, also, he repeats, that no one has a right to run after girls who does not yet carry a gun, and the elder lads sometimes brutally ill-treat any younger boy found going about with a girl. No doubt this is often preliminary to much license later.