Let us suppose that our country has become involved in a war. At the edge of your town a battle rages. You can hear the roar of cannon and clash of steel as columns of men fall in their blood, cut down by the flashing sabres and flying canister. Re-enforcements are hurrying to the scene. Up the street comes a regiment of soldiers with flags waving, drums beating and arms gleaming in the sunshine. Your son, your boy, standing in the doorway, laughs and cheers as they approach. The band strikes up a lively air. The boy beats time with his feet, starts, hesitates and then, with a wave of his cap, falls in line with the gay procession and marches joyously toward the scene of death and carnage.

Madam, at such a moment what would you do? Would you sit calmly at your window and see him go innocently, blindly on to the danger that you knew lay just beyond the turn of the road?

Would you not fly to his side and draw him back and hold him tight in your arms? And if he were big and strong and insistent, though still your boy, would you not at least tell him that war is not all music and drum-beats and bright uniforms? Would you not warn him of its dangers, of its horrors? If he must go and you could not hold him, would you let him go unwarned of its realities—and unarmed?

Well, there is a war in progress—in our country, in your town; a war more terrible, more revolting than any chronicled in history. The youth of America are marching toward the battleground, and the splendid column is passing your window now, to-day and every day. Perhaps you do not see the conflict yourself, for the battlefield is always just around the corner.

As sure as you have a son, just so sure will he some day turn that corner. Just so sure will he some day stand on your doorstep, and feel the lure of the passing show, and just so sure will he some time be drawn into the conflict, when he will have to fight his way through as best he can. At six he is in your arms; at sixteen he will be on the firing-line; at twenty-six the ordeal will have passed and the battle will have been lost or won. Can you then look backward into the past and feel that you had warned and fortified him?

I can. Whatever may be in store for my boy, he goes to meet it with more than my prayers—he has, also, a full knowledge of life’s mysteries. He shares with me a thorough understanding of the evils that may beset him. If my affectionate admonitions can help him, he has them; if my mistakes of the past serve as danger signals along his pathway, he knows of them; if my longer experience and broader knowledge of the world’s ways can save him, he shall escape the snares and pitfalls that await the heedless step of the untaught and untold young.

Before he was seven I had told him whence we come. Scraps of conversation overheard on the street between his own playfellows warned me that the time had come and made my duty clear. I saw the pity of it! My boy, whom I had taught to look trustfully to me for the truth at all times and about all things; my boy hearing distorted and vulgarised bits of knowledge that should have come to him solemnly and sacredly from the parent whom he had learned to look upon as the fountainhead!

This is what I told him:

“God made everything, as you know. He made the sea and the land, the sky and the stars and the sun and the moon. He makes the trees and the plants and the animals and the boys and the girls who grow to be men and women. But when I say God makes these things I do not mean that He makes them with tools, as you would make a playhouse, or with His hands, as you would make a snow-man. He makes all of these things by a great plan which He has laid out and by which all things, with His help, spring up and grow, over and over again, so that the world may go on just as it is for years and years. By this plan all living things come from a seed. This seed is within all grown-up plants and grown-up animals. When a new plant is needed, a seed falls from the grown-up plant and falls into the soil, where it sprouts and becomes a young plant. Every kind of animal is composed of two sexes, the male sex and the female sex. The fathers are of the male sex; the mothers of the female sex. As the seed of plants is within the flower, so the seed of animals is within the mother animal. When a new animal is needed the seed within the mother slowly grows into a young animal like the father or mother, and while it is still very small it comes out into the light and sunshine; and that is what we mean when we say it is born. Men and women are animals. They are different from all other animals in that they can talk and think and are much higher and better in every way. But the seed forms within the mother just as it does within the plants and birds and animals of all kinds. And when another child is needed the seed begins to grow and takes the form of a little child and after awhile it comes into the world to be dressed and fed and cared for; that is what we mean when we say that a babe has been born. That is how you came into the world and how I came and how all of us came. It is all a part of God’s wonderful plan to keep the world growing greater and better and more beautiful. It is not good for boys to talk about these beautiful things in a rough way, and I hope you will not do so. I tell them to you because I want you to know the truth. If there is anything you do not understand, ask me and I will explain it. Whatever you may hear, no matter whether it is good or bad, if you want to know the truth about it come to me and I will tell you.”

That was all. Science in words of two syllables. Science is truth, and truth is what your boy demands.

My boy took me at my word. He came back for further enlightenment more than once. But every time I answered him soberly, freely and truthfully. And when he knew everything he was immune to that contamination which mystery breeds. And what is more, the parent had measured up to the child’s ideal. The father was still the fountainhead; and no boy will drink from the stagnant pool of vulgarity when the clear crystal water of truth is close at hand.

Revealing the science of propagation to the child-boy is, after all, only the first step toward unfolding the many facts of sex—facts that are made mysteries through the inexcusable selfishness—or modesty, if you prefer to call it that—of mothers and fathers. If sealing the secrets of sex is an injustice to the boy of six, it is a scarlet sin against the youth of sixteen. At six he is looking at life curiously from the family dooryard—within the mother’s call; but at sixteen or soon thereafter, he strides out into the street, marches down the highway and turns the corner. He is on the firing-line. Now comes a crisis in the boy’s life so acute, so grave that I approach the subject with trepidation. My poor pen, tempered by that delicacy demanded of printed words, seems incapable of the task before me. And I approach it also with reverence because I look upon it as an almost divine privilege to be permitted to discuss with an army of mothers a problem which I regard as the great tragedy of American youth.

Nature is good, Nature is provident, but above all Nature is self-preservative. Go to your naturalists, your entomologists, and they will all tell you that the law of perpetuation is first and foremost among all living things. Man is no exception. Your boy, just coming into his maturity, is in this respect like unto all other growing things that God has made. As he ripens toward manhood this instinct becomes more manifest within him. Vaguely, perhaps, he recognises its import, but in the main it is a mystery. In a general way he may reason out its purpose; but how can he know its humanised limitations? How can he know that the refining process of civilisation has demanded a check upon the exercise of Nature’s functions? And—here is the vital issue—how shall he know of the dread penalties Nature sometimes exacts when these restraints are violated? Why is it that the loving father and mother, who labour with him and watch over him and shield him through childhood, decline to raise a finger of warning against the grim spectre of disease that stalks behind the painted faces of the underworld? Must it be written, to the shame of human parenthood, that the very horror of this evil stays the warning hand? Or does the mother fall into that too common error of thinking that this evil of evils is open to every boy but her own? Then listen to this, which I quote from an eminent authority:

Mothers, let not your eyes be blinded to a condition that medical records have proven to be a fact. It may be your boy and it may be mine.

The chances of its being mine are reduced to the minimum—because my boy will know. The revelation, as I make it, is so simple and yet so complete, that it could be accomplished with equal ease by mother or father. When he is about sixteen I place in his hand a book that tells him all, and I say to him: “My boy, when you are alone, read this.[1] There are truths in it which you should know.” From that hour the “great social peril” must fight my son in the open. He knows all that science can teach—all that parents can tell.

I am going to say now what I should have said at the outset—that the father, though he may leave every other phase of the boy’s development to the mother, should take the initiative in sex enlightenment. He should regard it as his peculiar right, his sacred privilege, to point out the devious paths through which he himself may have threaded his way from youth to man’s estate. There are no barriers between me and my boy. The oneness of affection and the sameness of sex easily compass the disparity in years. He grows older but I do not, for I am waiting for him. In fact I am going back to him—I am meeting him halfway. Our play is as boy with boy. Our talks are as man to man.

In a relationship like this there are no “sex secrets.” There is no ice to break, because the transmission of knowledge is consistent, gradual and unconscious. But when the father fails in his duty and the mother has to step into the breach, it is different, I concede. There is a certain reserve which is womanly, and perhaps not unmotherly. Still, mother’s love is a poor thing if it cannot break down that slender wall to save the boy. And mother’s love is not a poor thing, but a great power. So if mothers can only be made to see why it must be done, and when and how, I believe they will do it.

This is an appeal not to parental love only, but to parental reason. It is made not by a purist, but by one who has travelled the road by which all boys must go, and who knows its every crook and turn. It is a plea in behalf of the American boy, who asks only that he be given a torch to light his way.