“In no department of our life are George Eliot’s words truer than in this department:  ’Our daily familiar life is but a hiding of ourselves from each other behind a screen of trivial words and deeds, and those who sit with us at the same hearth are often the farthest off from the deep human soul within us—­full of unspoken evil and unacted good.’  We cannot prevent a boy’s obtaining information on sexual questions.  Our choice lies between leaving him to pick it up from unclean and vulgar minds, which will make it guilty and impure, and giving it ourselves in such a way as to invest it from the first with a sacred character.

“Another idea which my experience proves to be an entire delusion is the idea that a boy’s natural refinement is a sufficient protection against defilement.  Some of the most refined boys I have had the pleasure of caring for have been pronounced victims of solitary sin.  That it is a sin at all, that it has, indeed, any significance, either ethical or spiritual, has not so much as occurred to most of them.  On what great moral question dare we leave the young to find their own way absolutely without guidance?  In this most difficult and dangerous of all questions we leave the young soul, stirred by novel and blind impulses, to grope in the darkness.  Is it any wonder if it fails to see things in their true relations?

“Again, it is sometimes thought that the consequences of secret sin are so patent as to deter a boy from the sin itself.  So far is this from being the case that I have never yet found a single boy (even among those who have, through it, made almost complete wrecks physically and mentally) who has of himself connected these consequences with the sin itself.  I have, on the other hand, known many sad cases in which, through the weakening of will power, which this habit causes, boys of high ideals have fallen again and again after their eyes have been fully opened.  This sin is rarely a conscious moral transgression.  The boy is a victim to be sympathised with and helped, not an offender to be reproved and punished.”

I desire to call the attention of the reader to two points in the foregoing extract.  I was particular in giving my credentials to state the character and limitations of my experience.  Everywhere in life one finds confident and sweeping generalisations made by men who have little or no experience to appeal to.  This is specially the case in the educational world, and perhaps most of all in discussions on this very subject.  Some men, at least, are willing to instruct the public with nothing better to guide them than the light of Nature.  It would greatly assist the quest of truth if everyone who ventures to address the public on this question would first present his credentials.