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they work from sheer necessity, and not because their parents recognize
work as a duty. And in over-fed children, as in over-fed animals,
sensuality is engendered unnaturally early.
Fashionable dress to-day, the course of reading, plays, music, dances,
luscious food, all the elements of our modern life, in a word, from the
pictures on the little boxes of sweetmeats up to the novel, the tale,
and the poem, contribute to fan this sensuality into a strong, consuming
flame, with the result that sexual vices and diseases have come to be
the normal conditions of the period of tender youth, and often continue
into the riper age of full-blown manhood. And I am of opinion that this
is not right.
It is high time it ceased. The children of human beings should not be
brought up as if they were animals; and we should set up as the object
and strive to maintain as the result of our labors something better and
nobler than a well-dressed body. This is my fourth contention.
In the fifth place, I am of opinion that, owing to the exaggerated and
erroneous significance attributed by our society to love and to the
idealized states that accompany and succeed it, the best energies of our
men and women are drawn forth and exhausted during the most promising
period of life; those of the men in the work of looking for, choosing,
and winning the most desirable objects of love, for which purpose lying
and fraud are held to be quite excusable; those of the women and girls
in alluring men and decoying them into liaisons or marriage by the most
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