had committed.

This, most often, is how our first contact with sexual life begins. The child grows up with a false picture stamped on his imagination, hard to erase; fear takes hold of him, and this fear is renewed whenever the memory of that scene returns to him. The father does not clear up the matter, the mother does not repair what she has spoiled, and the child does not dare to broach the subject a second time. The child grows older, but his thirst to solve this obscure secret — which the mother's attitude has made all the more tangled — increases with the days; so he turns to his friends, where the result is a mistaken, corrupt understanding of sexual matters, an understanding coupled with fear — that fear which weakens the child's personality, indeed paralyzes it utterly.

Sexual matters hold a lofty place in the life of the individual and of society, and they are the foundation of the emotional life by whose balance the individual's personality is balanced and grows sound and strong. Acquaintance with them must begin in childhood, and the greatest responsibility falls upon the parents, because the first idea stamped on the child's imagination will be sound if the parents' attitude is sound, and corrupt if their attitude is corrupt. Parents, then, must give this side of life the greatest importance, and proceed with their children in teaching them sexual matters at a steady, contin-uous, frank pace that suits their mentality at every stage of their growth — so that when the young man's mind ripens, his information about these matters ripens with it, and he acquires a sound conception that makes him look upon them not as something forbidden but as a natural matter, just as he

looks upon any other organ in his physiological being.

Dr. Nasib Barbir

I ask: does our neglecting to talk these things over with them, to tell them the truths frankly, and our withholding of counsel from them, keep them from understand-ing what we wished to hide? Are they barred from frequenting the moving-picture houses, from attending the provocative romantic dramas, from reading the licentious books with which the bookshops overflow — all of which create in the young man's soul, however strong his temper, however high his upbringing, however proud his spirit, a picture of sexual matters that is not the truth, but distorted and harmful, if not deadly? There is no doubt that adolescence is a dan-gerous age — nay, the most dan-gerous stage in a person's life. In it his inclinations show themselves according to his impressions: if we meet him with good, good follows; if with evil, evil. The adolescent — student or worker, poor or rich — turns in his every movement and stillness and thought toward sexual inquiry, not to learn the truths but most often to put them into practice, whether he wills it or not, because he is driven to it by the sexual instinct — that instinct which we must tend with polish and refinement if we are to keep the young man's future sound in health. In this way we cut off the road of corruption before the weak of soul, and cut off from the weak of mind grievous diseases beside which death itself is easier. And this can only be done if we explain to them the truths about the reproductive organs and their diseases; then there grows in them the faculty of courage and of facing the fact as it is, so that if some harm befalls them they speak frankly to their family

and hasten to the remedy before the disease grows rampant.

In times past they used to hide from adolescents everything relating to the reproductive organs, their connection with psychological and health conditions, and their regrettable — indeed grievous — effects upon public health and upon society, believing that merely to broach this subject held danger — and what danger! — for the young man and the girl and for their futures, since it would awaken in them the reproductive sense and they would go astray. And they would come, of course, to prop up their opinion with examples that had happened to some Zayd among men or to some Bakr — examples true only of that Zayd and that Bakr, because such a one is sick in thought and soul and senses, and the abnormal case is no measure. The measures of virtue with them lay in the boy's and the girl's ignorance of everything connected with sex, and the family's delight grew the more their child displayed the utmost degrees of ignorance and simple-mindedness, in the belief that this was purity, all purity, and goodness, all goodness. And they did not know what hidden habits there were — more evil and more calamitous than the deadly diseases, for they destroy bodies, dissolve souls, waste minds, and kill sound offspring.

But today we live in a society entirely different from that igno-rant society. Having changed so many of our worn-out customs and marched forward up the ascents of progress and civilization, we must change these measures as well, so that there enters into the very core of our teaching programs the subject of hygiene in its fullest sense, in which we explain

to the darlings of our