SEX HYGIENE A TRIAL IN CHICAGO

Evening Post, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 74, 28 March 1914, Page 10

SEX HYGIENE A TRIAL IN CHICAGO

SCATHING AMERICAN CRITICISM. The sex hygiene lecture course has been withdrawn from the Chicago schools after a career described by the San Francisco Argonaut "as brief as it was disgraceful." It lived for tv month. It spread a miasma of nastiness throughout the country. And it was finally buried under Hhe protests of outraged parents. Beyond the fact that these hygiene lectures in their printed form were banned by the United States post office as "obscene" the Argonaut confesses to know very little of their actual nature. " The Fed era] authorities did what they could to isolate the plague," continues the Californian journal, " but the editor of the Minneapolis Bellman tells us that he so far connived at a breach of the law as to receive through the mails n copy of these school lectures He read Miem and then burned them, as they were ' unfit to be kept on file.' Now the Bellman is by no means a Puritanical journal. It deals frankly and freely with the topics of the day, but its editor tells us that these -lectures ' were incredibly and unspeakably vile, bald,., coarse, and crude.' He tells us that loathsome diseases of which decent people know practically nothing were described in detail, and that the most abominable of the lot was written by a woman.. IN THE NAMfe OF REFORM. te " It was almost incredible," he says, that even old people should tolerate such filth as had been carefully prepared for children. It conveyed the impression that ' the powers of hell were let loose on earth ' with special license lo corrupt and contaminate the young. And this iniquity was perpetrated in the name of reform, at the instigation of verminous minds, and to the appkVuse of the maniacs who seem momentarily to have taken over many departments of the government of this country. Fortunately the experiment lasted only about a month. "Unfortunately there is no way in which its child victims can be quarantined and disinfected until the poison instilled into them can be neutralised. " The editor of the Bellman tells us that he was most struck by the absence of all reference to moral restraint. The lectures seemed to be addressed to the hopelessly defiled, to those who were beyond the reach of any force except the lash of physical disease in its most horrible forms. And there indeed we have the heart and the kernel of this whole evil business, the benumbing and coarsening materialism that blinds the vision to all those finer forces of life that should be evidenced more in education than in anything else. THE FRUITS OF FEAR. " The child that has been teught the innate values of self-government simply because it is self-government is proofarmoured at every point, and not against one specified temptation only, but against all temptation. • To avoid a moral wrong because of its physical consequences is merely to add cowardice and baseness to an inevitable mental, if not bodily, libertinism. Of course no one- ever does avoid a moral wrong for such a cause as this. Fear ha* produced cunning and caution in a thousand instances, but it never yet pro- 1 duced a virtue or even the semblance ' of one. The only tolerable motive for avoiding evil is the fact that ifc is evil. Nothing else .counts nor ever will count Even the ignorant mountpbanks who seem to be in control of the Chicago schools should know that. " This abominable business has received a check at Chicago, but we have by no means heard the last of it. The

determined appeals of vicious penny-a--line ministers eager to hover on the profitable edge of indecency, of hysterical women hag-ridden by pruriences, and of those who trade greedily in the obsessions of the moment will take care to keep it alive. But at least we can record some part of the immeasurable outrage inflicted upon the children of Chicago thus debauched by a fanaticism that is beyond the reach alike of reason and of virtue."