Page:The Woman Socialist - Snowden - 1907.djvu/56

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The Woman Socialist

it at the same time, and by their early comradeship shall learn to honour one another in later life, each recognising the other's peculiar strength and virtues, each helping each in mutual confidence and affection. Plato's prayer shall have more success in Socialist England than it had in heathen Greece—"That young men and women should be more frequently permitted to meet one another, so that there should be less enmity and indifference in the married life."

Opinions as to the benefits, or otherwise, of co-education are very varied. Very few serious objections are urged against the co-education of small children of both sexes. But it is felt by many to be a dangerous proceeding to bring together young men and women at the most critical period of their lives, when the sex-impulse is strongest, and when their studies are liable to be forgotten or neglected in the more attractive occupations of lovers.

If this argument be founded on present experience, it is an additional condemnation of the present system and of its false ideals, producing as it does the over-sexed female, eager for her mate, and the self-indulgent male, superior in the knowledge of his