“Men, as I have shown, have been severely dealt with by Nature in this respect:  she has forced them, at a time of life when their minds are ill compacted, their ideas chaotic, and their wills untrained, to face an ordeal which demands above all things reverence based on knowledge and resolution sustained by high affections.  An enormously large proportion flounder blindly into the mire before they know what it is, not necessarily, but very often into the defilement of evil habit, but, still more often, into the tainted air of diseased opinion, and after a few years some of them emerge saved, but so as by fire."[B]

[Footnote B:  Pages 4 et seq.:  the italics are mine.]

The following are quotations from the Upton Letters, written by Mr. A.C.  Benson.  Mr. Benson is one of the most distinguished of modern teachers:  he has had long experience of public-school life both as a boy and as a master:  he has that insight into the heart of boyhood which can come only to one who has affectionate sympathy with boys and has been the recipient of their confidences.  It will be abundantly evident from the passages which follow that in Mr. Benson’s opinion no boy is likely to preserve his “innocence” in passing through a public school.

“The subject is so unpleasant that many masters dare not speak of it at all, and excuse themselves by saying that they don’t want to put ideas into boys’ heads.  I cannot conscientiously believe that a man who has been through a big public school himself can honestly be afraid of that.”  “The standard of purity is low:  a vicious boy does not find his vicious tendencies by any means a bar to social success.”  This, of course, assumes that the vicious tendencies are a matter of notoriety.  A similar implication is involved in the following:  “I do not mean to say that there are not many boys who are both pure-minded and honest; but they treat such virtues as a secret preference of their own, and do not consider that it is in the least necessary to interfere with the practice of others or even to disapprove of it.”  He further gives it as his opinion that “The deadly and insidious temptation of impurity has, as far as one can learn, increased,” and tells us “An innocent-minded boy whose natural inclination to purity gave way before perpetual temptation and even compulsion might be thought to have erred, but would have scanty, if any, expression of either sympathy or pity from other boys; while if he breathed the least hint of his miserable position to a master and the fact came out, he would be universally scouted....  One hears of simply heart-rending cases where a boy dare not even tell his parents of what he endures.”  It would thus appear that in some of the premier schools of the world impurity is a matter of notoriety, sometimes of compulsion; and that, to a boy’s own strong inclination to concealment, is superadded, by the public opinion of the school, an imperious command that this concealment shall, even in heart-rending cases, be maintained.