Mrs. Ellis’s Failure MARGARET C. ANDERSON There was one great fault to be found with Mrs. Ellis’s lecture: it was not illuminating. It might have failed in any number of other ways and still have been a real contribution; but it should not have dared to fall short in that respect, because Mrs. Ellis came forward in the role of one who has a message and because she chose a subject upon which one must have a message or not talk at all. What Mrs. Ellis did is the kind of thing against which our generation has its deepest grudge, and it constitutes a very special case of what we mean when we talk so heatedly about Truth. We mean nothing startling by that:—simply that quality which some one has had the good sense to call “releasing.” A few days before the lecture Mrs. Ellis said that she might as well call her talk anything except merely “Sex and Eugenics,” because she meant to discuss love, spiritually, sex abnormalities, and many other matters. “I have read all my husband’s manuscripts before they were published and I know he has never told anything but the truth about sex,” she said. “I have waited some thirty years to talk about these things, and I shall tell the truth as I know it, if I am sent to jail or put out of Chicago for it.” On another occasion she said that she meant to talk of those people who, through perverted or inverted sexual tendencies, faced the problem of having to turn their abnormality—perhaps their gift of genius, if we understood these things better—into creative channels. Because of all this it was only natural to expect a message from Mrs. Ellis.