his own youthful experience Hoche records precisely similar observations, and remarks that the lovers were by no means recruited from the vicious elements in the school.  (The elder scholars, of 21 or 22 years of age, formed regular sexual relationships with the servant-girls in the house.) It is probable that the homosexual relationships in English schools are, as a rule, not more vicious than those described by Hoche, but that the concealment in which they are wrapped leads to exaggeration.  In the course of a discussion on this matter over thirty years ago, “Olim Etoniensis” wrote (Journal of Education, 1882, p. 85) that, on making a list of the vicious boys he had known at Eton, he found that “these very boys had become cabinet ministers, statesmen, officers, clergymen, country-gentlemen, etc., and that they are nearly all of them fathers of thriving families, respected and prosperous.”  But, as Marro has remarked, the question is not thus settled.  Public distinction by no means necessarily implies any fine degree of private morality.

Sometimes the manifestations thus appearing in schools or wherever youths are congregated together are not truly homosexual, but exhibit a more or less brutal or even sadistic perversion of the immature sexual instinct.  This may be illustrated by the following narrative concerning a large London city warehouse:  “A youth left my class at the age of 161/2,” writes a correspondent, “to take up an apprenticeship in a large wholesale firm in G——­ Street.  Fortunately he went on probation of three weeks before articling.  He came to me at the end of the first week asking me to intercede with his mother (he had no father) not to let him return.  He told me that almost nightly, and especially when new fellows came, the youths in his dormitory (eleven in number) would waylay him, hold him down, and rub his parts to the tune of some comic song or dance-music.  The boy who could choose the fastest time had the privilege of performing the operation, and most had to be the victim in turn unless new boys entered, when they would sometimes be subjected to this for a week.  This boy, having been brought up strictly, was shocked, dazed, and alarmed; but they stopped him from calling out, and he dared not report it.  Most boys entered direct on their apprenticeship without probation, and had no chance to get out.  I procured the boy’s release from the place and gave the manager to understand what went on.”  In such a case as this it has usually happened that a strong boy of brutal and perverse instincts and some force of character initiates proceedings which the others either fall into with complacency or are too weak to resist.

Max Dessoir[127] came to the conclusion that “an undifferentiated sexual feeling is normal, on the average, during the first years of puberty,—­i.e., from 13 to 15 in boys and from 12 to 14 in girls,—­while in later years it must be regarded as pathological.”