Sexual ethics : a study of borderland questions

Preface To English Edition

In former times England was a country in which sexual problems — although, as everywhere, they were then exiled from the domain of science — had a free right of entry into the field of letters. During the nineteenth century, however, for reasons which cannot here be discussed, England became fiercely hostile to all literary study or discussion of questions of sex. Whilst elsewhere, and above all in France, Germany, Russia, and Scandinavia, there sprang into existence a new literature, in part fictional, and in part scientific, dealing, under infinite shades of tendency and with an almost maternal care, with the supreme problems of the human sexual life, England appeared to veil its countenance before such problems. The door was wrathfully slammed in the face of these inopportune and undesired guests.

Of late years, however, there has been a change. Men of courage and of insight, in science as well as in literature, have devoted themselves to the establishment of a better order, not only by the method of critical revolt, but also by the method of research, and have sought to unfold the inner philosophy of the relations between the sexes. It

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results that England, which not so long ago was the hindmost of the nations in matters of sexual investigation, now stands in the first rank.

The modest book which to-day, not without hesitation, I offer to the English-speaking world, is the work of a man who in inclinations, blood, tastes, and the happenings of his life, unites elements from three nations to which he is profoundly attached— Germany, France, and Italy. But to England he is a stranger, and his book, he fears, may manifest this in respect of form or of content. He has confidence, none the less, in the magnanimity of the British people, from whom, like so many before him, he ventures to demand the right of asylum.

ROBERT MICHELS.

Turin, January 1914.

PREFACE.

This book is the outcome of the author’s observations throughout a long period of years. From early youth onwards he has devoted much and arduous reflection to the problems of sex. In his economic and historical studies, concerned as these have necessarily been with man as he is, he has always kept in view also the question of what man is destined to become. During the years of his university career, alike under the steel-grey skies of the iron Germans, in the violet atmosphere of Parisian life in the Quartier Latin, and under the ardent sun of the inspired children of Italy, he has always been at work in one way or another upon the same intractable problems — upon the attempt to reconcile youthful love with elderly morals.

This work thus consists of empirical observations, psychological and sociological in character. These observations are not presented in any strictly scientific form, by which I mean to imply that although I refer again and again to the acquirements of the various social sciences, I avoid as far as possible the use of statistical and tabular methods, and the employment of a jargon unintelligible to the ordinary cultured reader. Those who understand

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PREFACE.

the value to the sexual psychologist of the masterworks of belletristric literature will not be astonished by the fact that in the footnotes I so often refer to passages in the writings of poets and novelists. Werner Sombart, the political economist, comparing the scientific expert with the poet, says with perfect truth, “ The work of either differs from that of the other far less than people would have us believe. The methods of presentation differ, but not the matter which is presented. When we hold fast to the idea that all classification of concepts, all systemification of ideas, all formulation of general laws, and the like, are nothing more than technical adjuvants in the study of human destinies, we shall be disinclined to agree with our professors in the importance they attach to the matter of external form. When such a writer as Zola, profoundly aware of his responsibilities, gains an imaginative insight into the inmost nature of the life of banking and the stock-market, into the mining and railroad industries, into the working conditions of our great shops and factories, and when he presents his results to us in an artistic form, does not this display a thousand times more true ‘ understanding ’ than that which we find in the arid if learned treatise of some dry-as-dust professor, who fails, for all his pains, to say anything really relevant to the matter in hand?”1

1 Sombart, “ Kail Marx und die soziale Wisscnschaft,” Arc/uv f. Sozialw ., vol. xxvi., No. 2, p. 449.

PREFACE.

IX

What Sombart writes of economic facts naturally applies with even greater force to psychological and sexual-psychological analyses. These fall within the true province of the poet and the novelist, and it is a field which has been cultivated by both to notable effect, although their work in this department has not hitherto received sufficient recognition. These considerations notwithstanding, I venture to hope that my book is not devoid of scientific importance, inasmuch as it has been my aim to discuss certain special problems which are proper subjects of scientific study, although their scientific study has not hitherto been adequately pursued.

In conclusion, a frank statement is desirable. This book is not written for those who believe themselves to have already attained finality in the solution of the problems of sexual morality upon the basis of some preconceived dogma — be that dogma Christian and Biblical, Darwinian and Hseckelian, libertarian or libertinist. Its aim is rather to serve as the meeting- place of a small group of selected and important problems which press themselves upon our attention and urgently demand solution. The reader must learn to know these problems, must examine them for himself. The first premise in this investigation is not merely the recognition that these problems exist, but the recognition that they are unsolved. From most other books dealing with like questions, this work differs above all in the fact that the author, since he

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PREFACE.

deals mainly with borderland questions, has drawn the necessary logical inference (notwithstanding his own inclination towards clear affirmation or denial, and apart from a few cases in which he has felt morally compelled to pass judgments and to express convictions), that he should rather question than answer, rather state problems than solve them.

Contents

PAGE

Preface to English Edition v

Preface - - - vii

Preliminary Observations ----- i

Rights and Limits of Erotic Literature — Foreign Terminology and its Function in the Language of Eroticism — Frankness of Expression as a means towards the Moralisation of the Erotic Life.

Dangers of Sexual Education — Need for Suitable Methods — The School or the Home? — Plain Answers to Plain Questions rather than Detailed Instruction— Campaign against Conventional Lies in Sexual Matters.

Chapter I

Necessity and Intensity of Sexual Love in a State of Nature — Urgency of Sexual Need as displayed in Popular Catchwords Ondiscriminating Character of the Sexual Impulse when Conventional Restraints are thrown aside— Ethical Limitations of the Right to Sexual Activity— The Primary Ethical Foundation of every Sexual Relationship must be the deliberate Consent of both Participants in the Love-Act.

xi xii CONTENTS.

Chapter II

Origin of Modesty in the Fact that Primitive Woman was a form of Booty — The Sentiment of Shame not Instinctive but Acquired— Instinctive Shamelessness of Woman — Professional Shamelessness and Occasional Shame — Modesty as manifested in Different Classes of Society — Shame in the Sexual Act — The Isolation of the Love-Pair.

Part II. Borderland Problems Of The Extra- Conjugal Erotic Life

CHAPTER I.

Comparative Sexual Psychology in Various Countries

International Character of Love — International Multiplicity of its Manifestations — Publicity of Love in Germany and Holland — Alcove-love in Italy — Contrast between Prostitution in Paris and Prostitution in Germany — Comradely Type of Prostitute — Sense of Honour and of Human Self-respect in the Grisette.

CHAPTER II.

Intermediate Stages of Sexual Morality in Woman

Unscientific Character of Sharp Delimitations in Matters of Sexual Morals — “ Legitimate” and “ Illegitimate" Children — “ Respectable’’ Prostitution — Brothel Workrooms — Demi-viergeisme in Public Dancing Saloons.

CHAPTER III. The Prostitute as the “Old Maid” of the Proletariat

Rarity of the Old-maid Type in the Working Classes — Need for Early Marriage in the Proletariat — Difficulties of attaining to Marriage in the Middle and Upper Classes, and the consequent Need for Prostitution — Etiology of Prostitution — Ineffective and Effective Methods for the Abolition of Prostitution.

t'AGE

CONTENTS.

xm

Chapter I. Page

Dualism of Woman in Primary Sexual Love - 120

The Shame of the Act of Unclothing — The Duel of the Sexes —

The Sadistic Note in the Sport of the Sexes — Woman’s Indecision in Face of the Sexual Act — Consent Simulating Reluctance, and Refusal Implying Consent — Dangers of this Phenomenon to the Man and to the Woman — Paradise or the Penitentiary? — Psycho-Physics of the Act of Rape — Ignorance of Girls regarding the Nature and Intensity of the Male Sexual Impulse — Limits of Responsibility in Erotic Relationships — Contributory Culpability of the Violated Woman.

Chapter II

Ethical Aspects of Extra-Conjugal Sexual Intercourse in Man and in Woman — Duplex Sexual Morality — Monogamy as a Sexual Ideal — Polygamy as the Fountain of Youth— Masculine Intact ness anti the Interest of the Community at large —Comparatively trifling Moral Value of the Men who remain Chaste To-day — Problem of the Relationship of Precedent Sexual Experiences to Love — Demand for Virginity in Women— Variations in the Erotic Needs in the Course of Human Li'e.

Chapter III

Moral and Physical Disadvantages of Abrupt Transitions in the Sexual Life — The Maiden’s Anxiety on the Wedding Night Dangers of Free Love — Marriage as the Ideal.

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CONTENTS.

Chapter I. Page

Outward Manifestations of the Subjection of

Woman in Marriace 194

Awakening of the Consciousness of the Rights of Woman — Analysis of a German Betrothal Card — Feudal and Masculine Supremacy — Woman’s honorific Titles before and after Marriage — Woman’s Change of Name on Marriage — The Mother and the Transmission of her Name to the Offspring.

CHAPTER II. The Physical Basis of Love — The Monogamous

Taming of Polygamous Tendencies - - 212

Sexual Character of Love — The Unwholesome Craving for a “Pure” Woman — The Progress of Sexual Love and its Conquests in the Physiological Domain — Habituation in the Amatory Life — Polygamous Tendencies of the Male — The Factor of Variety and its Rights — The Maintenance of Vivacity in the Sexual Relationships of Married Life as a Prophylaxis against Adulteiy — The Aisthetic Postulate.

CHAPTER III. Conjugal Procreation: its Rights and rrs Duties 232

Beauty of the Paternal Instinct — Responsible Character of the Act of Procreation — Ethical Need for the Limitation of the Family: on account of Poverty; for the Pieservation of Property — High Death-rate in Large Families — Destruction of Conjugal Happiness owing to the Decline of Erotic Capacity in Woman — Lack of Value to the Higher Civilisation of the “Eternal Mother” — Prompt Procreation after Marriage and its Deleterious Consequences — Right to the Use of Aitificial Means for the Prevention of Conception as a Logical Inference from the Right of the Individual to the Free Disposal of his own Person — Non-existence of the Unconceived Infant — Limitation of Population in Relation to

CONTENTS.

xv the World Economy —Excess of Population and National Expansion — Population in Relation to Average Wealth — Conscious Procreation as a Criterion of Civilisation, and as the Unwitting Enemy of Jingoism — The Proposal that the Limitation of the Family should be effected by a Postponement of the Age at Marriage; its Refutation — Prudential Restraint ” in Married Life as a Method for the Limitation of the Family — Sexual Love an end in itself — Preventive Intercourse and Crime — The Prevention of Conception purely a Technical and Mechanical Question — Conscious Procreation as a Factor in the Process of the Emancipation of Mankind from the Dominion of the Blind Forces of Nature.

Chapter IV

Certain Shoals in the Waters of Married Life — Intellectual Cultivation in Woman and its Limits -------

Conflict between Profession and Motherhood— Conflict between Intellectual Cultivation and Maternal Duties — Conflict between the Woman as Mother and the Woman as Wife —Concentration of the Mother on the Child— Fatherhood and Motherhood in their Psycho-physiological Relationships to the Child — Motherhood as an Episode in Woman’s Life — Superfluous Maternal Occupations— Necessity for the Care of Household and Children— Simplification of these Problems through the Collaboration of the Husband— Woman at the Parting of the Ways, where she has to choose between Husband and Child.

Index

PAGE

SEXUAL ETHICS.

PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS.

Rights and Limits of Erotic Literature— Foreign Terminology and its Function in the Language of Eroticism— Frankness of Expression as a means towards the Moralisation of the Erotic Life.

The ethical relationships of the sexual life are thorny and difficult questions. Before attempting to summarise the general lines of discussion of these borderland questions, I shall venture upon two concise affirmations to serve as a basis for the whole argument.

The first of these affirmations is that no one can possibly fail to admit the universality of the phenomenon of sex. There is no other question, in fact, upon which everyone has so much first-hand experience. If we except infants-in-arms, and a few invalids and very old persons, the whole of our race is subordinated to the phenomena of sex as a means of suffering or a means of joy. Among all the varied manifestations of human life, it may be said that sexuality is the only one with which all are familiar, and in regard to which none are altogether incompetent. Thus it would be superfluous to open our discussion with a proof of the importance or the actuality of the facts of the sexual life. The most

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SEXUAL ETHICS.

deplorable intellectual or physical inertia will not suffice to hold in leash the luxuriant vivacity of the sexual instinct, which often breaks free none the less. This instinct, in such cases, stands firm like a column amid the ruins of a pagan temple, the rest of which has been destroyed in the passage of the years or by the devastation of war. This instinct is the one which remains active when all other psycho-physical manifestations are dead or dormant. Hence I do not hesitate to affirm that the discussion of sexual problems necessarily arouses interest, open, it may be, in a few instances, and secret in the majority, but fervent in all.

My second affirmation is equally self-evident, and is based upon wide general experience alike practical and scientific. It is my firm conviction that it would be a great gain to our moral life to break the silence which surrounds the sexual question — above all, in such countries as Italy and England, lands where in so many respects opinion is liberal and advanced. On moral grounds it is necessary to raise a vigorous protest against the practice of hushing-up. It is my contention that in these matters, in which people are accustomed to speak in half-tones or in whispers, we should rather raise our voices, and use words that cannot possibly be misunderstood, avoiding alike the immodesty of false shame and the spurious purity of drawing-room innuendoes. It is necessary to bear in mind that to the man of science no doors should be closed, and no realms of thought should be denied. In other words, I maintain the profound truth of the saying, “ to the pure all things are pure.” Montaigne asks with perfect justice: “ Qu’a faict Taction genitale

PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS.

aux hommes, si naturelle, si necessaire et si juste, pour n’en oser parler san vergougne, et pour l’exclure des propos serieux et reglez ? Nous prononcerons hardiement tuer, desrobber, trahier ; et cela, nous n’oserions qu’entre les dents.”1 We must bring ourselves on this question to the attitude of my little daughter, for, seeing for the first time a Greek statue, whose nudity was veiled in a barbarously prudish manner, she angrily exclaimed, “ Oh, how horrid, dadda, to put that leaf just there!” A primary aim of this study is to wage war upon all such fig-leaves, for the author is convinced that to J do this will be advantageous, not aesthetically alone, but also ethically, and above all scientifically; for accurate scientific researches are impossible, if the thought-process, etiolated from conventional fear, makes use of convenient subterfuges to shun the plain light of day.

Erotic matters, like all weighty and serious questions, must be discussed with perfect freedom. Per se, everything can be said, and ought to be said, provided that every word is guided by an austere will, and provided that the phraseology is as choice as possible. Sincerity, when accompanied by grace, does not merely suffice to give an artistic stamp to life, but induces a clearness which guides us as near to a solution as the limitations of human intelligence render possible.

1 Michel de Montaigne, Essais, I.ivre III., Chapitre V., Paris, 1828, Tardieu-Denesle, Tome cinquieme, p. 63. — “How has it come to pass that the genital action of human beings, so natural, so necessary, and so right, is a matter of which we cannot speak without shame, and one with which we cannot deal seriously and sensibly? We speak boldly of killing, thieving , and betraying ; but this other we mention only with bated breath.”

SEXUAL ETHICS.

Rigorous legislative measures may be suitably employed against the novel, and also against the alleged scientific treatise, written in the sole aim of inducing sexual excitement — all the more in view of the fact that such publications are extremely profitable in the commercial sense. As Friedrich Theodor Yischer rightly points out, the meanest wretch is sure to gain his ends when lie works with sexual stimuli, for, however thick-skinned the reader, he has sexual nerves none the less.1

At least eighty per cent, of the literary productions of the sexual order which are exposed for sale in different towns or countries — openly in some, secretly in others, according as social customs and police regulations vary — might be committed to the flames without hesitation, and without giving the watchdogs of democracy the right to accuse of high treason against art those who destroy such garbage. It is true that among such publications are some written with the best intentions in the world, which yet convey a certain sulphurous flavour; having been condemned by the less intelligent zealots of the purity campaign, they are for this very reason sought out by profit-hunting publishers, and their sale is pushed on the ground that they are books full of a “spice” they do not really possess. It need hardly be said that the crusade against obscene literature must not be directed solely from a one-sided moral point of view, but must be guided also by artistic criteria. Some years ago, in the loggia of the inner court of the Uflizi in Florence, a hawker offered me an album of prohibited photographs of the nude,

1 Fr. Th. Vischer, A tick Einer , 3rd ed., Stuttgart and Leipzig, iSS4, vol. ii., p. 364.

PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS.

depicting the sexual act in a number of different positions. In addition to nineteen really repulsive caricatures of the love-act, there was one which, in view of the circumstances, might have been expected to be no less vulgar; and yet, owing to the physical beauty of the two figures, the artistic grace of their pose, and the expression of a certain inward spirituality, this last was a really fine picture. I still blush with anger to recall the fact that in an access of false shame I drove the hawker away, and thus deprived myself of the possession of something which would have furnished permanent artistic enjoyment.

Above all, in this connection, it is necessary to bear one fact in mind, namely, that it is impossible by means of the campaign against obscenity to expel sexual offences from the world, or even greatly to limit their extent. The purity fanatics regard obscene literature — which, be it said in passing, they define in a pietistic and petty-bourgeois sense — as a work of the devil; and they believe that by burning such literature they will conjure the devil himself out of the world. They may be compared with those backwoodsmen who think that the existence of doctors is responsible for the causation of disease ; like the wiseacres, who contend that the increase in crime results from the increasing number of lawyers; or like that philosopher who became insane, and had come to believe that the rapid course of time and the consequent coming of old age was the work of watchmakers. The war against pornography will not be decided by the prosecution of the pornographers, but by a cleansing, and above all, if the expression be permitted, by a sinccrification of human sexual relationships; and, in view of the fact that these

SEXUAL ETHICS.

relationships are no more than one important link in the chain of human relations in general, by a sanation of life as a whole, and not least in its economic sphere.

It is characteristic of our time, that when we want to speak of delicate subjects, we are often compelled to use foreign phraseology. In Germany, for instance, they speak of the demi-monde, of a roue, of an Alphonse (instead of using the good German word Zuhdltcr ) ; in Italy, as in England, the same type of individual is called a souteneur (replacing, as far as Italian is concerned, the native terms ruffiano and mezzano) ; 1 in France, towards the beginning of the nineteenth century, to denote a debauchee, in place of the native terms, libertin, debauche, or noceur, the word of English origin lovelace2 was for a time current. The French terms, cocotte, chanteuse, viveur, have found their way into all the other languages of Europe; in Italian, for instance, it would to-day produce a ridiculous impression to speak of these respectively as pollastrina, briffalda, and vivitorc? These linguistic practices do not signify that in Germany, France, Italy, or England, the things to which these exotic names are applied were before lacking, or that they were first recognised to exist at

1 In individual Italian towns we find special terms, and very expressive ones, to denote a man maintained by a prostitute out of her earnings. In Rome, such a one is known as magnaccia (glutton); in Naples, ricotta.ro (cheese-maker); in Turin, gargagnan (untranslatable term).

u This term originated from the name Lovelace, one of the principal characters in Richardson's romance, Clarissa Harlowe ( 1748).

3 We take these crude attempts at the translation of French erotic terms into Italian from a critical article by Gugliclmo Alterocca : “ II

magistrato della lingun (“The Mastery of Language”), Avanti, anno xv, No. 21 .

PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS.

the time when the foreign word was imported to describe them. The fact that the article of local manufacture was well enough known long before is sufficiently proved, inasmuch as in all cases alike native terms were in regular use until driven out by the foreign importation.

In speaking of such subjects it is considered more elegant and less repulsive to use foreign phraseology; the employment of native terms is felt to be coarse, and to smack of the gutter. In a German drawing-room, we may speak of a man’s rnaUresse, but the word Metze is banned, as in Italian the word druda. At the same time, by the use of the imported expression, the understanding of its significance is often restricted to a small cultured circle, and not being common to all is no longer felt to be vulgar. English, Germans, Italians, and Slavs will cheerfully and freely repeat lewd anecdotes, verses, and proverbs in the French tongue, things which only in the most intimate talk among men they would venture to express in their native language. Medical practitioners, in conversation with educated patients, do indeed speak about venereal diseases and other matters relating to the sexual life, in the phraseology of their native tongue, if only for the reason that they themselves have forgotten their Latin, while the patients know little or nothing of that language. But even then it is only the verbs and the adjectives for which genuinely native forms are used, whereas the noun-substantives arc discreetly veiled and elevated by the employment of a Greco-Latin terminology.

In his lascivious romance, Lcs bijoux indiscrcis, Diderot did not venture to incur the wrath either of

SEXUAL ETHICS.

the public or of the censorship by recounting in the French tongue all the love-wanderings of the Sultan’s favourite, some of which really overstep the boundary. For this reason, wherever the lewdness of the story approaches a climax, he breaks off the French narrative,. and for four or five pages diverges into the Latin, the English, the Italian or the Spanish tongue, according as his heroine is enjoying her experiences in one country or the other.1 By this means he at once eludes the vigilance of the censor, and limits the circle of readers of these particular passages to a few polyglots. I myself bought for twopence, from one of the best known second-hand booksellers on the Quai de l’lnstitut in Paris, a fine old edition of this work in several volumes, after it had been handled and rejected by hundreds of young soldiers and students, of whom it is probable that three in every four were in search of precisely this sort of matter. To secure such a work as this, spicy to a degree beyond all their hopes, they would doubtless have spent their last penny, had not the treasure been hidden from their eyes in a foreign tongue.

The safest foundation for the treatment of sexual matters is to be found in a natural way of thinking and feeling. In a nation which regards the sexual impulse as natural and truly human there will be less tendency to the misuse of that impulse. For this reason, though perhaps in many respects more sensual than the northerner, the southerner is less inclined to obscenity and pornography. A glance at the sexual life of Italy will convince us of the truth of this view.

1 Paris, 1797, pp. 223 el scq.

In a biography of the composer Johannes Brahms, we read that it was an especial delight to him when in Italy to pass month after month among people “who do not need a veneer after the manner of the upper classes of society to enable them to remain graceful and charming in most of the relationships of life, people who are able to conduct themselves naturally in all circumstances, and to do this spontaneously and without calculation.”1 Naturalness is in truth the leading characteristic of the Italian temperament. It is not meant to imply that this naturalness is always identical with honesty. Impostors are perhaps commoner in Italy than elsewhere. But the method of imposture is natural, and one might almost say innocent ; and on the other hand, by a logical outcome, we rarely encounter in Italy the complicated frauds, carried out with the aid of a thousand precautions, sophistications, and refinements, which so often provide work for the police of Vienna, Paris, Berlin,and London, and above all of Anglo-Saxon America.

A frank naturalness in all things is a hereditary endowment of the Italian nation. There is no other country in the world in which aesthetic ideas, the concepts of beauty and ugliness, play so large a part in popular life as they do in Italy. A zealous and cultured socialist candidate for parliament, doctor by profession and Jew by race, found his electoral campaign rendered practically impossible by the fact that his physically unpleasing personality was too antipathetic to electors thirsting not only for freedom but also for beauty. Nowhere is a handsome man so publicly admired, nowhere an ugly one

1 J. P. Widmann, “Brahms in Italicn,” Die Deutsche Rundschau, vul. xxiii. , No 10 (June, 1897), p. 62.

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SEXUAL ETHICS.

regarded so obviously, not perhaps with scorn, but .with pity, as in the Apennine peninsula. The socialist doctor just mentioned, in a friendly circle, expressed his wish to take part in a German congress ; in all seriousness he was advised to abandon this intention, lest the Germans should be presented with so unfavourable an idea of the beauty of Italian manhood. Here is another example. About fifteen years ago the writer visited Venice in the company of a German friend, not gifted by nature, perhaps, with the graces of Apollo, and whose many years’ membership of a students’ corps1 was documented by a horribly scarred visage. Again and again women and children crowded round the table where we were sitting at coffee, stared open-mouthed at my friend, and then exclaimed, not with any intention of being offensive, but simply because no other way occurred to them of voicing an incontrovertible fact, “ Ma com’e brutto costui ! ” (“ My ! what an ugly one ! ”) Conventional hypocrisy is to a large extent unknown in Italy. The sagacious critic Vischer, who certainly cannot be reckoned among the injudicious foreign enthusiasts for all things Italian, expresses a just admiration for the “unchangeable antique simplicity,” the “natural pathos,” and the “inborn nobility of the customs” of those “beings at once both spiritual and natural,” the Italians, among whom, in his view, affectation is unknown. 2 This is actually

1 These corps are students’ clubs, each comprising all the students of a particular faculty. They are regulated by certain conventional laws, which govern their di inking bouts, and which force the members to take part in duels with adversaries selected by lot, and usually belonging to some other corps.

- Fr. Th. Vischer, Krilischc Gauge. New Scries, 1861-6 6, vol. i. pp. 178 el set/., and vol. vi. pp. 169 el set/.

PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS. II

the case. To the stranger passing the night in a hospice, the nun will indicate the privy, in the most simple way in the world, without a blush, and without thought of the need for one. At a dinner party, at which the author was one of the guests, the host — he was, it is true, a medical man — in the most professional tone, before we sat down to table, indicated to us all the whereabouts of the water-closet. Not one of the guests was in the least embarrassed. Similarly, in talking about sexual matters, Italians show little prudery. In speaking to a pregnant woman, to allude to her condition, even if she is a stranger, is regarded as in no way improper. In Piedmont, among all classes of society, there still exists a remarkable linguistic usage, whereby the expression of “ having a baby,” is avoided by speaking of “ buying a baby.” La signora A . B. ha oggi comprato un bambino (Mrs. A. B. has bought a baby to-day). This is here the regular locution. But it is an isolated conventional insincerity limited to this particular region,1 and contrasts therefore all the more strongly with the general freedom of speech in these matters. Stories for children like that current in Germany about babies being brought by storks, or like those current in England about the baby being found in the cabbage-patch or brought by the doctor in his bag, are unknown in Italy. In southern Italy, not the least attempt is made to conceal sexual matters from growing boys and girls. Generally speaking, the Italian makes singularly little circum-