invited to come in either to examine or borrow the books, or to consult about any matters concerning the school.

Very cordially yours,
(Signed) CHARLES M. Adams,

Issued by vote of teachers and officers,

Feb. 18, 1913.

Superintendent.

In the Sunday-school of which I am Superintendent, which enrolls 1,000 scholars in the teen years, we have for years promoted some plans for sex education, such as:

(a) Occasional talks by a Christian physician to groups of the young men, whose teachers were also in attendance these talks being given delicately, scientifically, but spiritually.

(b) Talks by a lady physician to the girls.

(c) Talks to the mothers in the Mothers' Association.

(d) The appointment of a committee of wise workers to promote the closer relation of home and Sunday-school on these matters, and to select helpful books for use by teachers and scholars.

(e) Circulation of certain helpful books by teachers among scholars of the class.

(f) Encouragement of conferences between teachers and scholars on life problems; and this problem will have a natural setting just here.

(g) The use of the machinery of the Employment Department which secures 300 positions annually for the young people to safeguard them from the moral perils in business.

In Brooklyn, Dr. George J. Fisher brought together a group of school representatives to instruct as to methods for developing sane plans of sex education in their schools.

There is general acknowledgment, I believe, of the great wisdom of promoting sex education in its normal relation to instruction as to the physical life, and in its relationship to religous character. One of our Brooklyn pastors sees that a Christian physician comes to his Confirmation Class annually and instructs them as to these matters-an ideal time and under ideal circumstances for the suggestions as to the conservation of the body for highest purposes.

The character of those promoting sex education and the spirit in which it is done are of as great importance as the instruction given. It is just here that the Sunday-school is a winning force. If we add to this its great organization, its close relation to the home, its voluntary character, we have a power to be reckoned with in any wise solution of the problem of sex education.

BOYS' AND GIRLS' ORGANIZATIONS AND SOCIAL

HYGIENE

LUTHER H. GULICK, M.D.

President, Camp Fire Girls of America

Friends, to chart the rocks is necessary, but a chart of rocks is not adequate as sailing directions for an ocean liner. To plot the dangers and to teach young people about the dangers into which they are going is necessary; but it is far more important to present sailing directions by which they may reach their desired port. In what ways may the lives of young people be so guided that the daily relations between boys and girls shall constantly be more wholesome and normal?

It is the direct aim of the Camp Fire Girls to promote social relations between boys and girls. The Camp Fire Girls aim to act within their own social radius as hostesses, recognizing the fact that woman has always excelled in those qualities which depend upon superiority in personal affection. The woman, the mother, has always seen the child in a different way from what the neighbor has. The mother has seen the bad boy and has seen beyond his badness into that thing which to other eyes was as yet non-existent; but because of her very vision-a true vision; because of her faith and insight the boy has become what she believed he was-and there are many, many of us men, how large a proportion nobody knows, who owe to our wives who have believed in and stuck to us, the fact that we are on our feet doing work-believed in us and stuck to us when we were failures, when, judged by all of our acts, we were failures. But they looked through and beyond. The hostess sees the diffident guest, sees how to bring him out, how to establish human relations between him and the others. The hostess knows also social usage, but knowing social usage does not constitute the hostess. This power to apply personal affection so that human beings shall come into wholesome relations is the power upon which we build. Camp Fire Girls is not a mission to women or to girls. It is an organization of young women-and we have something over 4,500 of them now-of a picked type, and girls who are rela

tively leaders in their community, to serve the community and to establish in terms of modern specialized social activity a body that shall as definitely take personal affection and apply it to their own social environment as the bridge engineer takes steel cables and stones and builds the bridge.

Woman is mother not mainly because of the physical fact of motherhood. When we say the word mother today we mean primarily the facts about which I have been speaking. We mean primarily a relation of affection between mother and daughter, or mother and son, or mother and somebody else's daughter.

The bulk of the activities carried on between young people in a large fraction of American communities now consists largely of dancing. We regard dancing as an inadequate social diet. We believe that by promoting, under the lead of the wise mother or the guardian, tramping, candy-pulling, suppers together out in the woods, skating, learning about trees, different ways of outdoor cooking, and a hundred and one other old-fashioned but nevertheless thoroughly interesting things for young people to do together, we are charting not the rocks, but the plain, splendid ocean across which lies the port of life. To bring about fine relations between boys and girls in a wholesome mingling is one of our main objects.

I think I speak for our Board of Directors when I say they believe that woman has a certain superiority with reference to gripping of the hearts of human kind, and of insight in bringing about these wholesome relations between people.

The day when these things can be adequately handled within the home has passed. Our children are at school; they are at the Sunday-school; they are on the playgrounds; they are on the ball field; they are at the "movie"; and at each one of these they are drinking of the water of social companionship. Social relations are no longer established mainly in the home. That is the fact, not a theory. Can the affection, which is the central fact in the home, be made to dominate the personal relations established in the factory, in the store and at the "movies," and on the beach as it has in the home? That is the question that is ahead of us-all of us. We have demonstrated that the old industries of the home-making of furniture, tools, laying of floor, making of lamps, making of clothing, shoes, can be trans

planted and has to be transplanted to the community, and we have our great factories and stores.

Man's job stands specialization. If we speak of woman's job primarily as the home, in an old-world, historic sense, can woman's job stand specialization? Let me speak concretely of a particular Camp Fire in Connecticut in illustrating a case:

In the first Camp Fire report that came in from this Camp Fire, I was interested to know that there were fourteen girl members and that the guardian had seventeen assistants. I was interested and felt a natural masculine curiosity, and I wrote back and spoke rather enthusiastically of the work they had done —and they had done a great deal of good work. I ended by saying that I was much interested in noting that she had seventeen assistants, and I much would like to know what they did and how she got them, and didn't the girls feel rather bored by the seventeen assistants? She wrote back that every girl had brought in her mother and they had secured the teacher of physical training in the public schools, and the person who did the medical examination, and the teacher in nature study as assistants for this Camp Fire, and that then they had taken all the home work and all the different crafts and divided them up, and each woman had undertaken to become a specialist, to know all there was to know that she could get hold of in, let us say, cooking, or the caring for things that are not used from one season to another season, the local geography, or nature study, to know all about the trees and birds in one's locality, and the significance of these things in reference to one's immediate locality. No human being can know all these things, and yet the children need to know something of all of them.

Now, here were fourteen mothers who restored their own grip upon life and the need of their own girls for them, by being responsible for the instruction in some one of these branches of their own daughters, and their friends. The girls met in succession in their own homes, and when they met in your home they were under your charge in reference to your specialty, and so on right through.

There is the application of the principles of specialization to social life. Here was the guardian, not taking the place of the mother as the center of everything, but acting as the medium through which each guardian came in touch with the other