That cleanliness and virtue are acquired and not innate is obvious enough from the fact that children who grow up among dirty and unprincipled people are rarely clean and virtuous.  Were it possible for the child of refined parents to grow up without example or precept in relation to table manners and morals, except the example and advice of vulgar people, who would expect refinement and consideration from him?  Is there anyone who has such faith in innate refinement that he would be content to let a child of his own, grow up without a hint on these matters, and with such example only as was supplied by association with vulgar people?  Yet this is precisely what we do in relation to the subject of personal purity.  The child has no good example to guide him.  The extent to which temptation comes to those whom he respects, the manner in which they comport themselves when tempted, the character of their sex relations are entirely hidden from him.  He is not only without example, he is without precept.  No ideals are set before him, no advice is given to him:  the very existence of anything in which ideals and advice are needful is ignored.

If in conditions like these we should expect a boy to grow up greedy, we may be certain that he will grow up impure.  At puberty there awakes within him by far the strongest appetite that human nature can experience—­an appetite against which some of the noblest of mankind have striven in vain.  The appetite is given abnormal strength by the artificial and stimulating conditions under which he lives.  The act which satisfies this appetite is also one of keen pleasure.  He has long been accustomed to caress his private parts, and the pleasure with which he does this is greatly enhanced.  He does not suspect that indulgence is harmful.  This pleasure, unlike that of eating, costs him nothing, and is ever available.  His powers of self-control are as yet undeveloped.  He can indulge himself without incurring the least suspicion.  He probably knows that most boys, of his age and above, indulge themselves.  The result is inevitable.  He finds that sexual thoughts are keenly pleasurable, and that they produce bodily exaltation.  He has much yet to learn on the subject of sex, and he enjoys the quest.  Wherever he turns he finds it now—­in his Bible, in animal life, in his classics, in the encyclopaedia, in his companions, and in the newspaper.  Day and night the subject is ever with him.  It is inevitable.  And at this juncture comes along the theorist who is aghast at our destroying the lad’s “innocence,” and at our “suggesting evils to him which otherwise he would never have thought of.”  “The boy’s innate modesty is quite a sufficient protection”!