degrading of all vices with prostitutes on the street.  They will defile the atmosphere of social life with filthy talk and ribald jest.  Even a clean and ennobling passion can do little to redeem them.  The pure stream of human love is made turbid with lust.  After a temporary uplifting in marriage the soul is again dragged down, marriage vows are broken and the blessings of home life are turned into wormwood and gall.

That a system so destructive of physical and of spiritual health should have lasted almost intact until now will, I believe, shortly become a matter for general amazement; for while evidence of the widespread character of youthful perversion is a product of quite recent years, the assumptions on which this system has been based are unreasonable and incapable of proof.

Since conclusive evidence of the prevalence of impurity among boys is available, I will not at present invite the reader to examine the assumptions which lead most people to a contrary belief.  When I do so, I shall hope to demonstrate that we might reasonably expect to find things precisely as they are.  In the first and second chapters we shall see to what conclusions teachers who have actual experience in the matter have been led.

There are several teachers whose authority in most matters stands so very much above my own that it might seem presumptuous to begin by laying my own experiences before the reader; but I venture to take this course because no other teacher, as far as I know, has published quite such definite evidence as I have done; and I think that the more general statements of such eminent men as Canon Lyttelton, Mr. A.C.  Benson, and Dr. Clement Dukes will appeal to the reader more powerfully when he has some idea of the manner in which conclusions on this subject may be reached.  I have some reason, also, for the belief that the paper I read in 1908 at the London University before the International Congress on Moral Education has been considered of great significance by very competent judges.  By a special decision of the Executive of the Congress it—­alone of all sectional papers—­was printed in extenso in the official report.  Later on, it came under the notice of Sir R. Baden-Powell, at whose request it was republished in the Headquarters Gazette—­the official organ of the Boy Scout movement.

It certainly did require some courage at the time to put my results before the public, for I was not then aware that men of great eminence in the educational world had already made equally sweeping, if less definite, statements.  Emboldened by this fact and by the commendations above referred to, I venture to quote the greater part of this short paper.

“The opinions I am about to put forward are based almost entirely on my own twenty years’ experience as a housemaster.  My house contains forty-eight boys, who vary in age from ten to nineteen and come from comfortable middle-class homes.