Of incomparably greater importance than Acton’s wide but abnormal experience and my own narrow but normal experience is the experience of Dr. Clement Dukes, which is very wide and perfectly normal.  No man has probably been in so good a position for forming an estimate as he has been.  Dr. Dukes thus sums up his opinion:  “The harm which results is moral, intellectual, and physical. Physically it is a frequent drain at a critical time of life when nature is providing for growth and development, and is ill able to bear it; it is a powerful nervous shock to the system ill-prepared to meet it....  It also causes muscular and mental debility, loss of spirit and manliness, and occasional insanity, suicide and homicide.  Moreover it leads to further uncontrollable passions in early manhood....  Further, this vice enfeebles the intellectual powers, inducing lethargy and obtuseness, and incapacity for hard mental work.  And last, and most of all, it is an immorality which stains the whole character and undermines the life.”

In this passage Dr. Dukes refers to the intellectual and moral harm of self-abuse as well as to its physical consequences.  Intimately connected as these are with one another, I am here attempting to give them separate treatment.  It is, however, impossible to treat perverted sex-knowledge and self-abuse separately; for though in young boys they are found independently of one another, and sometimes co-exist in elder boys without any intimate conscious association, their results are identical.  In the following pages, therefore, I shall refer to them jointly as impurity.

The earliest evil which springs from impurity is the destruction of the intimacy which has hitherto existed between the boy and his parents.  Closely associated with this is that duplicity of life which results from secrets which may be shared with the coarse but must be jealously concealed from everyone who is respected.  Untold harm follows these changes in a lad.  Hitherto he has had nothing to conceal from his mother—­unless, indeed, his parents have been foolish enough to drive him into deception by undue severity over childish mistakes, and accidents, and moral lapses.  Every matter which has occupied his thoughts he has freely shared with those who can best lead him into the path of moral health.

Henceforth all is changed.  The lad has his own inner life which he must completely screen from the kind eyes which have hitherto been his spiritual lights.  Concealment is soon found to be an easy thing.  Acts and words are things of which others may take cognisance; the inner life no one can ever know.  A world is opened to the lad in which the restraints of adult opinion are not felt at all and the guidance and inspiration of a father’s or mother’s love never come.  How completely this is the case in regard to impurity the reader will hardly doubt if he remembers that all parents believe their boys to be innocent, and that some 90 per cent. of them