but the few who belong to this class are usually too cunning to get caught.  It used to be notorious at school that it was almost always the wrong people who got dropped on.  I do not think a boy in the other two classes should ever be expelled, and even when expulsion is unavoidable, it should, if possible, be deferred till the end of the term, so as to make it indistinguishable from an ordinary departure.  After all, there is no reason to ruin a boy’s prospects because he is a little beast at sixteen; there are very few hopeless incorrigibles at that age.

“As regards the other two classes, I should begin by giving boys very much fuller enlightenment on sexual subjects than is usually done, before they go to a public school at all.  Either a boy is pitchforked into the place in utter innocence and ignorance, and yields to temptations to do things which he vaguely, if at all, realizes are wrong, and that only because a puzzling sort of instinct tells him so; or else he is given just enough information to whet his curiosity, usually in the shape of warnings against certain apparently harmless bodily acts, which he not unnaturally tries out of curiosity, and finds them very pleasant.  It may be undesirable that a boy should have full knowledge, at the time he goes to school, but it is more undesirable that he should go with a burning curiosity, or a total ignorance on the subject.  I am convinced that much might be done in the way of prevention if boys were told more, and allowed to be open.  Much of the pleasure of sexual talk among boys I believe to be due to the spurious interest aroused by the fact that it is forbidden fruit, and involves risk if caught.  It seems to me that frankness is far more moral than suggestion.  I would not ‘expurgate’ school editions of great authors; the frank obscenity of parts of Shakespeare is far less immoral than the prurient prudishness which declines to print it, but numbers the lines in such a way that the boy can go home and look up the omitted passage in a complete edition, with a distinct sense of guilt, which is where the harm comes in.”

It is probable that only a small proportion of homosexual boys in schools can properly be described as “vicious.”  A. Hoche, describing homosexuality in German schools ("Zuer Frage der forensischen Beurteilung sexuellen Vergehen,” Neurologisches Centralblatt, 1896, No. 2), and putting together communications received from various medical men regarding their own youthful experiences at school, finds relationships of the kind very common, usually between boys of different ages and school-classes.  According to one observer, the feminine, or passive, part was always played by a boy of girlish form and complexion, and the relationships were somewhat like those of normal lovers, with kissing, poems, love-letters, scenes of jealousy, sometimes visits to each other in bed, but without masturbation, pederasty, or other grossly physical manifestations.  From