SEX HYGIENE

Marlborough Express, Volume XLVIII, Issue 77, 1 April 1914, Page 2

SEX HYGIENE

A TRIAL IN CHICAGO. SCATHING AMERICAS* CRITICISM. Tlie sex hygiene lecture course has oeen withdrawn from the Chicago schools after a career described by the San Francisco Argonaut "as brief as it was disgraceful." It lived for a. month. It spitead a miasma of tiastiness throughout the country, and it was final-}*•• buried under the 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 Federal authorities did what they could to isolate the plague," continues the California^ 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 a copy of these schools tocfeuKSs. He read them and then burned them,

' as they were ' unlit to be kept on t file.' Now ±he Bellman is by ho {.means a Puritanical journal. -It ; deals frankly and freely with the topics of the day, but its editor tells ;us that these lectures ' were mii aredibly and unspeakably vile, bald, •; coarse, and crude.' He tells us that ! loathsome diseases of which decent : people know practically nothing were I described in detail, and that the most * abominable of the lot was written > by a woman. j. IN THE NAME OF REFORM. ! "It was almost incredible/ he says v ' that even old people should tolerate : such filth as liad been carefully pre- :■ pared for children. It conveyed the impression that 'the powers of. hell • were let loose on earth' with special ; license to corrupt and contaminate the young. And this iniquity was perpetrated in the name of reform, at the instigation of verminous minds, j and to the applause 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 arid disinfected until the poison instilled into them can be neutralised. "The editor of the Bellman tells tts 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 tho heart and the kernel of this whole evil business, the benumbing and coarsening materialism that blinds the visionio all those finer, forces of life that should be evidenced .more in education than in anything eJse. THE FRUITS OF FEAR, "Tho child that has- been taught the innate values of colf-government simply because it is k . If-government is proof-armored at every pofnjfc, and not against one spec :jV~I temptation only, but against all t. iptation. To avoid a moral wrong Lecause of its physical consequences is merely to add cowardice and baseness, to ail inevitable mental, if not bodily, libortinisru. Of course, no one ever doee avoid a moral wrong for such a cause as this. Fear has produced cunning and caution in a thousand instances, but it never yet produced a virtue or even the semblance of one. The only tolerable motive for avoiding evil is the fact that it is evil. Nothing else counts nor ever will count. Evon the ignorant mountebanks .who soem to be in control of the Chicago schools should know that. "This abominable business has received a cheek in Chicago, but we have by no means heard the last of it. The determined appeals of vicious penny-a-liro ministers, eager to hover on the profitable edge of indecency, of feysterical 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 tinl of Chicago thus debauched by a fanaticism that is beyond the reach alike of reason arid of virtue."