Sex in a Mist

...In an introductory paragraph, we are reminded that the conference is the oldest "Youth Internationale" in the world, its first meeting dating back to one held at Paris in 1855, and that it had under its eyes, while preparing the report in question, a record of investigation covering at least the years since the war...

...It was countered, we are not told from what quarter, by the rather obvious retort that sex immorality is by no means confined to those whose poverty tends to make it a state concern...

...Moreover, the questionnaire method, which was adopted at Helsingfors, is one eminently calculated to call forth the widest possible divergences of opinion and to secure their presentation in the most independent form...

...The summary of a report of the Nineteenth World Conference of the Young Men's Christian Association on sex matters, held in the temperate clime of Helsingfors last summer, was published in the Eebruary issue of the Journal of Social Hygiene, and is now reprinted in pamphlet form for the benefit of a wider public than that stimulating organ can claim...

...IILTHEN 1,500 delegates, representing fifty coun" ' tries, meet together to discuss matters sublunary, the result may either be Babel or a very striking exemplification of that much-sought factor, the least common multiple...

...On the whole, this resume of a unique gathering, compiled by one of its members, is a sobering, perhaps a depressing document...

...The picture that reaches us from it is of a world in which sex, as a conscious factor in life, is gaining power at the very time its natural solution in Christian marriage is being hampered by all sorts of "social wants that war against the strength of youth...

...If nothing more weighty than a symposium of youth upon a subject that is frankly recognized as peculiarly its own, the report merits the attention it has already received and the wider notice it is pretty sure to get in its new form...

...To one delegate from Scotland it seems to have occurred that low wages paid to girls in stores and factories are partly responsible for the recruiting of the underworld...

...To young crusaders from Poland, Scotland and Germany, who indicted the tenement, with its promiscuity and the difficulty of courting being conducted under conditions possible in a separate home, however humble, the disheartening rider is added that "it may well be questioned whether the moral situation today [in the country] is noticeably superior to that in our great cities...

...It is with a decided shock that we hear, apparently again from Asia, the forthright charge that many American-made pictures are "international nuisances," and urging upon the American Alliance the "production of cleaner films...

...Perhaps the most hopeful words reach us from Italy, in the speech of one delegate who declared that in his own country "economic difficulties in the way of marriage are so great that the couple no longer thinks about them and the young home is equipped only with courage...

...While young South African delegates could see little or nothing contributory to laxity in the modern dance, pronouncing it, indeed, "one of the most healthy forms of amusement which we have for young men and women," Oriental delegates made no bones about their opinion and used the harsh word "obscene" for dancing in its contemporary and Occidental form...

...Montaigne, the doubter, was reechoed a few decades later by an even greater writer, who has told us that there is "nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so...

...We shall not be surprised to find that very sharp differences of opinion reached the conference in Finland as to the degrees in importance of things which are making for new standards in sex conduct...

...And Kipling, in our own day, has summed up the same thought in epigrammatic verse, somewhat to the effect that the wildest dreams of Kew are a commonplace in Peru...

...A group from the United States put the much-debated "movies" in the last place as influences that make for questionable practices...

...To recognize this courage, to lend it support and countenance in the face of a world from which the conception of a home as the only sane cell and unit is seeping away, is none the less the duty of every government worthy the name because, as the conference declares in its closing paragraph (perhaps unconscious how deep the implications of its phrase sink into the Catholic heart) "the solution of this problem in the individual life cannot be found in knowledge alone, but requires with it the power of Christ...

...The same failure to agree upon any one main outstanding factor as responsible for evils which all deplore breaks out in places where national prejudices cannot be held accountable...