of his talk upon me was a bad one.  One of the results of the habit, according to his statements, was insanity.  Therefore I expected at any moment to lose my mind.  I felt that I must stop the practice at once, but the matter became so great an obsession that again and again I broke my resolutions for reform.  I undertook exercise, dieting, the reading of serious literature:  all of which I had seen referred to in books as methods of lessening sexual desire.  The object of these disciplinary practices was always the thing most prominently in mind, and so they were of no avail.  Fortunately I entered college a little later, and the affairs of school life gradually took a commanding place in my thoughts, and the practice was not so much in mind.  I did not, however, completely break away from it until almost the time of my marriage.  If the present attitude of the scientific medical world toward the subject had been known to me, I do not believe that any evil would have come to me from the practice.  At a later period of my life, say between 21 and 24, I would not indulge the habit for a considerable interval.  At times I did not notice the presence or lack of desire.  But then there would come periods when I would be under a severe sexual tension.  This would be marked by intense nervousness, an inability to fix my attention upon any one thing, and a great desire to have intercourse.  An act of masturbation at such a time would generally give relief.  However, when I yielded to this form of relief, there would always follow feelings of profound self-reproach and of self-repugnance.  Had I had nocturnal emissions they might have relieved me; but, as I have said before, they very rarely occurred.  When, rarely, one did occur I would be greatly frightened, for I had the old, erroneous idea that they meant serious weakness and always ascribed them to my bad habit.  That my habit of masturbation had any relation to the rarity of the involuntary emissions would, of course, be a matter of pure conjecture.  In passing from the discussion of personal masturbation, I wish to say that my associations with boys as a pupil and as a teacher lead me to believe that the practice is practically universal.  When discussing the hygienic evils of prostitution with boy pupils I have noted that, whereas not infrequently a boy will voluntarily protest that he has never had intercourse, there has always been a significant silence when masturbation is mentioned.  I have never heard a boy make a denial, direct or indirect, that he had indulged in the practice.  But it has seldom been a perversion.  It has rather been, as in my own case, an available means of relieving a sexual impulse.

“During my college life I associated with many boys who had more or less regular sexual relations with prostitutes or with girls who were not virtuous.  Their attitude toward the practice was an immoral one.  The ethical aspect of irregular sexual relations never concerned them.