an orator and preacher. As a result of this erroneous idea, indulgence was repeated several times every night. He also confessed to a fear of his loss of self-control and consequent disgrace should his wife be taken away from him, and, being a man of desire to keep right, he suffered morbid fear of being away from her any length of time. It is hardly necessary to say that his natural oratorical power had begun to fail and his audiences to dwindle. He was advised to have immediately an operation for the removal of a tightened foreskin, and middle hemorrhoids. So fearful was he of losing his "virility" that he declined the surgical work, preferring rather a sickly wife and his supposed manliness. To remove the scales of sensuality from his vision was impossible so long as the shackles remained on the terminal nerves of his pelvic orifices, even though I thundered at him oracles of high ideals, of scientific facts, and furthermore, a prophecy of his insanity inside of two

years.

Three years had rolled by, and sure enough he had been insane just one year when again he fell into our hands; this time with a subconscious conviction of his insanity, which he connected with my prophecy of three years before.

He was then circumcised, and never a boy needed it more than did this man of the clergy, and the father of grown children. His hemorrhoids were also removed. And, presto, change! he became a new man and caught the first glimpse of true manhood he had ever known.

He is now able to conserve or allow to functionate, at will, his sexual existence. He is capable of satisfaction and joys in all things of which he never dreamed before. He is also moderate in all things. His wife is happy and well. His preaching is blessed of God. He is a grateful, virile, self-controlled man.

Many similar cases could be cited, but these four represent a class of physical causes leading up to the physical cure of sensual ideas and desires, of the diseases in question. In this connection also should be mentioned a telescoped sigmoid flexure, which is responsible for such erotism of the sexual system in both man and woman.

Psychical Causes of Sensuality.

And now let us consider the psychic causes of sensuality. These may be classified as both predisposing and exciting. For these causes we must look to past generations as well as into the child's own immediate environment.

Examples of Psychic Causes Leading to Sensuality.

A child is born of a lineage of uncontrolled sexual desires. His conception takes place under conditions of selfish masculine rights, regardless of the mother's feeling in the matter. She is, therefore, constantly in a mental attitude of silent rebellion. She feels defrauded and humiliated. Her real womanly sexuality is killed. Because of her enforced slavery, her whole being rebels against an unwritten and accepted law of man's superior privileges

and woman's subjection thereto. Her youthful dreams of wifehood are buried in the ashes of her love. She is not ready for maternity under those unfair conditions, with her love nature misunderstood and defrauded of right expression, and the resulting conception is unwelcome, blessed neither by God nor man, merely a miserable disappointing accident.

In such a home there exist no ideals, and as the child of such parentage comes to an age to ask questions, the mother, hating everything pertaining to sex, is in no mood to teach the child rightly. She cannot teach him the beauty of sex life rightly lived, for she sees no beauty in it. About the whole matter, then, is thrown a miserable secrecy. The mother cannot and will not explain, and the child gets his information elsewhere.-in the school yard, in the street. Even though the child receive no definite sex information outside his home, he absorbs as only a child can absorb into his subconsciousness a feeling towards sex common to that existing in the minds of his parents.

If to this unfortunate inheritance and environment is added physical irritation from a tightened foreskin, the child when he comes to puberty is already a premature sensualist. He is ready, when his elders tell him their hellish lies in regard to the necessity of prostitution, to accept their teaching, and let us never forget that for every boy thus taught there must come to be a ruined girl.

A boy like this, untaught and unprepared, is sneered at because he has not had gonorrhea, and even granting that he may struggle for a time with certain inherent sense of right and wrong, he has no foundation upon which to stand, and especially when his advisors are sometimes his own physician and college professors, what fate is there for him? What future other than that of a youthful libertine who in due time will pay his bitter price in disease and suffering? Such a youth is like a ship without a rudder; he is at the mercy of wind and wave.

Such a story has very recently come to our notice, and in the end the young man, sending his wife back to her father, diseased and ruined, saying that he could not support her, boasted almost in the same breath that he preferred the thirteen other women whom he controlled to his wife.

As to the treatment of these cases of sensuality. We have already spoken of physical conditions which produce the diseases and of the treatment. Let us now consider preventive measures. The prohibitive, sanitive measures by regulation and emasculation of the degenerate, though of primary importance, we cannot take time here to consider.

Carrying the matter back to its final analysis we must recognize first of all, as in the physical realm, the primary cause.-that of inherited wrong-thinking together with a wrong atmosphere in early childhood. Subconscious mentality, we must recognize, stands back of all.

There is but one course, then, to pursue, we must begin with the parents of today who have little children. They it is who must

be taught the truths of sexuality so that they may, as far as in them lies, begin at once to counteract inherited teachings by supplanting in the subsconcious mind, thoughts that are right, sane, and good, both for the child and for the race.

Between the child and the parent there should be no secrecy; he should even in early childhood feel that he is a part of his parents every interest; that they are interested in his desires; that they feel that he is interested in theirs, that perfect fellowship exists between them and that he may rely upon his parents for honest explanation of any and every problem that comes to him as he goes out into the world.

A child thus taught has no use for the filthy companion, for the filthy story. His trained tastes rebel at the low instincts of the street child; he knows how to weigh his sentiments against theirs. and having when very young learned to turn to his parents as his guide, he will continue naturally and freely.

We do not half appreciate the influence we have upon a little child, forming it and bending it to what is right and best. Many a child is wilful and hard to manage in matters of opinion and will, but in matters of subconscious absorbtion of whatever we place habitually before him, he is pitifully at our mercy to make or to

mar.

Those parents whose children are already in their teens can, however, do very little along sex instruction unless they have done so long before. Youths are self-conscious when at adolescence. and the parents' opportunity is past. For such children, there must be help provided outside the home. These young people are full of wonder, they long to know; but the teacher, the physician must be their instructor now. At this age they will take from the teacher, pastor or physician what they will not from their parents.

Some provision then must be made for these young people who stand today upon the very threshold of life; some one must teach them their duty towards themselves and towards the community of which they are a part. Some provision must be made. for teaching them the truth of their newly-awakened nature; they must know the dangers into which they walk all unconsciously, and for their own sake and for the sake of those with whom sometime they will be closely associated we must paint the dangers as black as they are, sparing nothing.

We must, however, show them at the same time homes in which right conditions prevail; where consideration and companionship bring joy and happiness. They must be taught that after all sane living brings truest home happiness; that young people whose children are welcome secure to themselves a happiness that the common sensualist does not know. They must be taught that the young man whose heart is in his home, his wife and children, gets far more out of life, is more loved, is happier in his love than the youth who lives an unclean and wandering life. They must be

taught that after all a home in which mutual trust and companionship and mutuality of simple and sane interests is the most satisfying place on earth. Many a man steeped in sensuality, finding his supposed happiness in the brothel, has been converted to sane ideals through coming in contact with one of these homes in which cleanliness and comradeship reign.

Before publishing my book, further to substantiate my position, I sent fourteen questions to fifty (senior) medical students. business men, and clergymen. These questions I asked them to answer with absolute honesty and to sign no names. Every one of these papers was promptly returned, the questions answered fully.

The first question was: "At what age did you learn about sex matters and from whom?"

Every man who answered said that he had been told of selfabuse while in the primary department or before entering school at all. Before sixteen years of age most of them had been told of lewd sexual relations. Thirteen replied, and be it to the credit of their parents, that while very young they had received right instruction from parents and had thus been prepared for what they would meet in the outside world.

Not one of the boys who had thus been taught had entered into sexual sin, and several of them said in reply to the question, "Were you ever advised to indulge in illicit sexual relations?" "No, I was never so advised; my elders knew where I stood and so knew better than to advise me so."

Y. M. C. A. experiences have taught me that most young men do look forward to home and wife and children, and if this be true, it is not a hopeless task to change the prevailing sentiment among the youth of our land. They are more ready for right teaching than we realize, and while we may see little progress in our own day, we may take courage and believe that with the mother of today being taught her duty in sex matters towards her children, and with the young man and young woman of today being taught their duty towards themselves and towards their homes to be, marked improvement will be seen before another fifty years has passed away.

Summarizing then, my appeal is that we as physicians, recognizing as we do our peculiar relationship to youth and our opportunity to raise the moral status of our land, learn not only to listen, to befriend and to serve with sympathy those who send out to us their cry for help, but that we learn to serve them efficiently.

In order to serve them efficiently we must ourselves understand, first, that back of all sensuality lie the psychic suggestions that have come down through the ages of unclean thinking creating a race mind that permeates, generates, and impels; that we must, then, bring to our youth the counteracting fact and the positive

message which latter findings in physiology give us in relation to disease and necessity.

Second, that we learn to recognize even minor physical abnormalities, irritations and pressure; acknowledging that these are conditions with which we must reckon in our attempt and desire to influence for good; that until wrong physical conditions are corrected our moralizing and exhortion are but "sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.”

Many a clergyman pleads with eloquence and fervor with his young parishioners: al! of which is but wasted effort because he knows nothing of those conditions which we, as physicians, recognize or should recognize. Again, many a clergyman who has chanced to come into an understanding of the physical side of things sends his charges to a physician only to have them returned to him in worse condition than when sent there; because the physician, being ignorant of these matters, tells the youth that he is all right, thereby adding to the youth's already present burden a hopelessness born of the feeling that everything has been done that can be done or needs to be done.

If then, after a time, this youth gives up the struggle and succumbs, at whose door does the sin lie,-at the youth's or at the doctor's?

Then, when the youth's problem has been wisely and carefully considered, from the standpoint of physical, mental and moral pathology, and not until then, let us appeal to our boys as David Starr Jordan so grandly appealed in a recent address to the students at the Leland Stanford University when he said:

"Young men, your first duty in life is to yourself. Your first duty is to so live that your after self-the man that you ought to be-may in his time be possible and actual. Far away in the twentieth century-in the twenties, and in the thirties-he is waiting his turn. His body, his brain, his soul, are in your boyish hands. He cannot help himself. What will you leave for him? Will it be a brain unspoiled by lust and dissipation, a mind trained to think and act, and a nervous system true as a dial in its response to the truth about you?

"Will you, boy of the twentieth century, let him come as a man among you in his time? Or will you throw away his inheritance before he has come to it? Will you turn over to him a brain distorted, a mind diseased, a will untrained to action. a spinal cord grown through and through with the devil-grass of that vile harvest we call wild oats?

"Will you let him come, taking your place, gaining through your experiences, hallowed through your joys, building upon then, as his own? Or will you fling his hope away, decreeing, wantonlike, that the man you might be, shall never be?"