(Discusses how parents and elders may help the young to avoid unhappy marriages.) I will make the assumption that you would like to have a trial of my cure for prostitution. You would like to do something right here and now, without waiting for the social revolution. Very well: I propose that you shall find a few other parents of boys and girls who are in revolt against our system of hidden vice, and that you will meet and form a modern marriage club. Only you won't call it that, of course; you will tactfully describe it as a literary society, or a social circle, or an Epworth League. The parents who run it will know what it is for, just as they do today; the only difference being that it will exist to promote love matches instead of money matches. It happens that I am myself a tactless sort of a person, not skillful at avoiding saying what I mean. So, in this chapter, I shall content myself with setting forth exactly what this marriage club will do, and leaving it to more clever people to supply the necessary camouflage.
This club will begin by correcting the most stupid of all our educational blunders, the assumption of the necessary immaturity of the young. Our young people nowadays have ten times as much chance to learn and ten times as much stimulus to learn as we had; and it is a generally safe assumption that they know much more than we think they do, and are ready to learn every sensible and interesting thing. I am carrying on an epistolary acquaintance with a little miss of twelve, who has read half a dozen of my books—among the "worst" of them—and writes me letters of grave appreciation. I have talked on Socialism to a thousand school children, and had them question me for an hour, and heard just as worth while questions as I have heard from an audience of bankers. Never in my life have I talked about real things with children that I did not find them proud to be treated seriously, and eager to show that they were worthy of that honor. A great part of our foolishness with children is due to the emptiness of our own heads.
These parents will delegate one man and one woman to make a thorough study of the sex education of the young. Of course, there is knowledge about sex which has to be given to the very youngest child, and more and more must be given as they grow older and ask more questions. But what I have in mind here is that detailed and precise knowledge which must be given to the young when they approach the period of puberty. At this age of fourteen or fifteen the man will take each of the boys apart, and the woman will take each of the girls, and will explain to them what they need to know. This duty will not be trusted to parents, for parents have an imbecile fear of talking straight to their children, and try to get by with rubbish about bees and flowers. Let every child know that the days of the hole-and-corner sex business is forever past, and that here is an instructed person, who talks real American, and knows what he is talking about, and will deal with facts, instead of with evasions.
This club will help to educate the youngsters, and also to give them a good time, developing both their minds and bodies, and learning to know them thoroughly. When they are sixteen each one will have another talk, this time about marriage and what it means; learning that it is not merely flirtations and delicious thrills, but a business partnership, and the deepest and best of all friendships. So when John finds that he likes Mary best of all the girls he knows, this won't be a subject for "kidding" and sly innuendo, and blushes and simpering on Mary's part, but an occasion for decent and sensible talk about what each of them really is, and what each thinks the other to be. If they think they are in lov............