The saddest thing in all this world is a human wreck,—a man or a woman,young or old, who is undone and who, in one or more walks of life, is a failure.There are so many of them! Mental wrecks, physical wrecks, nervous wrecks,social wrecks, business wrecks, character wrecks. The aspect of these derelicts isthe more pitiable because of the possibilities before every well-born humanbeing, who, with the endowment of intelligence and other gifts and powersbestowed upon him by a kind Creator, is capable of rising to heights of humanperfection. Ample provision made for man’s every need and want by God, andyet we find misery where there ought to be happiness, poverty where there oughtto be riches, darkness where there ought to be light, ignorance where there oughtto be knowledge, vice where there ought to be virtue, and turmoil and strifewhere there ought to be peace. Only too accurately do the poet’s words apply:“Of all the sad words of tongue or pen,The saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’”This problem of human wreckage becomes more depressing when weconsider that in the breast of every person there is an innate desire to live true, towin success. The day dreams of every boy and girl picture themselves as thehero or the heroine in the story which weaves into its plot their ideal men andwomen. Their ideals may be low, that is the fault of their environment andtraining, but their ideals always represent their own highest conceptions ofmanhood and womanhood. But sooner or later struggle comes, appetite craves,and passion cries out, and if they are unprepared for life’s real conflict, they godown, and another failure is recorded and another wreck left to float andendanger every other craft upon life’s seas, until human wreckage is becomingso enormous that it is a question in the minds of scientists and sociologists as tohow long humanity can keep up its present pace and survive the centuries.The causes of human wrecks are many, far too many to be tabulated orenumerated. In a sentence they result from the principle that it is easier to coastthan to climb; so much easier to float than to struggle against the current. Likethe weeds that kill out the crops, just so is humanity beset by enumerabletemptations at every turn, social and economic customs force downward a greatmany who would otherwise rise to higher things, and, it is suspected, that in thevery nature of man there is a strong tendency to evil which can be overcomeonly by divine grace. Appetite and passion are the two forces to which man’shigher aspirations most often give way. Intemperance and impurity, in theirbroader meaning, are the two bars upon which most human wrecks havestranded. Social impurity, or the abuse of the sex function and nature, is by farthe most insidious, and with respect to the number and degradation of itsvictims, the greatest evil in the world to-day.This book is one of the most valuable ever written because it treats fully andwisely this question of personal and social purity; it points out the reefs, the bars,the snags, the icebergs, the shallow and dangerous places where human wrecksare made; it guides those who accept it as their pilot into the deep waters of anunobstructed channel where the voyage of life will be ever safe, successful,glorious. Here will be found an incentive to climb rather than to coast, aninspiration to struggle even against the current if in the struggle may be wonsome of the more valuable prizes of life. Here is a book that holds high thesingle standard of morality, and demands that men shall be as pure as women; itstands boldly for the education of the young in sex hygiene, and proclaims atruth that ought long ago to have been universally known, that it is the right ofevery person to know every knowable fact pertaining to themselves, and thatsuch knowledge ought to be imparted to them before the lack of it has broughtinjury to their lives. This is a book that will help to forever banish that falsemodesty and prurient thinking which has made the tremendous growth of publicvice a reality, until every girl is in danger of enslavement and every boythreatened with its corruption.