from making a mock of pregnancy, whether "legitimate" or "illegitimate." When we see a young woman bearing a new life in her womb, owing her position it may be to all the subtle arts of the seducer, and note how cruelly she is treated by the law and what scorn and contempt are poured upon her by society and by the individual, we cannot fail to welcome most heartily the movement for the Protection of Motherhood (_Mutterschutzbewegung_) which has recently made such progress in Germany. When children are properly educated, there is reason to hope that sexual matters will be less often treated in an obscene spirit than is the case to-day. Nor need we fear, when such education becomes the rule, that every allusion to sexual things may involve dangers to the child. Precisely because the sexual life will then be known to the child in a natural way, will there be less reason to dread the deliberate cultivation by children of sexual topics of conversation. When at school the love adventures of Mars and Venus are the subject of the lesson, in children thus educated no unclean thoughts need arise. It must never be forgotten, however, that when the imagination has been perverted, opportunities for unclean thoughts recur with extraordinary frequency; and indeed by no means whatever can such opportunities be altogether avoided. Since this is so, we must strengthen the child against the dangers it will inevitably encounter, and must be careful not to pervert its imagination by a false prudery. Of course we must avoid leading the child to dwell too much upon sexual topics, and fortunately human beings have numerous other interests. The sphere of the sexual must be regarded as a fraction merely of the general educational field. The inculcation of true ideas of morality, and of a sense of honour not confined to externals but one by which the entire being is permeated--these will be the safest essentials of a good sexual and general education. [1] _Infancy_ appears to be the best English term to represent the German _Saenglingsalter_, literally "age of suckling." It is true that the _legal_ denotation of the term _infancy_ is "the period from a person's birth to the attainment of the age of twenty-one years," but in common speech an _infant_ is "a child during the first two or three years of life," whilst writers on _infant mortality_ restrict the term to the sense employed in the text. Thus Newman, in _The Health of the State_ (p. 108), writes: "Infants are children under twelve months of age."--TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.