If you will observe them, children mate as naturally as the birds do.
Here they are dancing about us like the sunbeams in the forest, in
pairs of natural selection. You may notice them in the home, in the
school and on the streets. Innocent little things they are in these
childish matings and might remain so to the end of life if some kind
intelligence were directing them. But no such intelligence is at hand.
The mothers joke about these matings and tease the children about them
and that is the end of the parents’ relation to this gravest question
in all life.
These children grow to fourteen or fifteen years of age and the
impulses from the sex nerve center begin to flood themselves out in
a perfect submergence of the life. They get hold of some silly love
stories, that have been written by some heartless person for so much
per line, and were never intended for any normal person to believe or
think possible, but to their childish minds it is a chapter from real
life, for they are not in any sense normal beings at this age as you
will see by a look at the triangle. At this age _the intelligence is
but a mere pigmy_ in their lives as compared to the giants of feeling
and physical life.