Although we are passing through a wave of moral legislation, there are yet indications that a sounder movement is coming into action. The demand for the teaching of sexual hygiene which parents, teachers, and physicians in Germany, the United States and elsewhere, are now striving to formulate and to supply will, if it is wisely carried out, effect far more for public morals than all the legislation in the world. Inconsistently enough, some of those who clamour for moral legislation also advocate the teaching of sexual hygiene. But there is no room for compromise or combination here. A training in sexual hygiene has no meaning if it is not a training, for men and women alike, in personal and social responsibility, in the right to know and to discriminate, and in so doing to attain self-conquest. A generation thus trained to self-respect and to respect for others has no use for a web of official regulations to protect its feeble and cloistered virtues from possible visions of evil, and an army of police to conduct it homewards at 9 p.m. Nor, on the other hand, can any reliable sense of social responsibility ever be developed in such an unwholesome atmosphere of petty moral officialdom. The two methods of moralization are radically antagonistic. There can be no doubt which of them we ought to pursue if we really desire to breed a firmly-fibred, clean-minded, and self-reliant race of manly men and womanly women. FOOTNOTES: [191] Westermarck, _Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_, Vol. I, p. 160; see also chapter on sexual morality in Havelock Ellis, _Studies in the Psychology of Sex_, Vol. VI, "Sex in Relation to Society," chap. IX. [192] It must be remembered that in medieval days not only adultery but the smallest infraction of what the Church regarded as morality could be punished in the Archdeacon's court; this continued to be the case in England even after the Reformation. See Archdeacon W.W. Hales' interesting work, _Precedents and Proceedings in Criminal Causes_ (1847), which is, as the author states, "a History of the Moral Police of the Church." [193] _The Social Evil in New York City_, p. 100. [194] This has been emphasized in an able and lucid discussion of this question by Dr. Hans Hagen, "Sittliche Werturteile," _Mutterschutz_, Heft I and II, 1906. Such recognition of popular morals, he justly remarks, is needed not only for the sake of the people, but for the sake of law itself.