Should the time ever come when parents give timely warning and instruction to boys, a very difficult problem will be solved for the schoolmaster.  But in the meantime what ought the schoolmaster to do?  The following plan commends itself to some eminent teachers.  As soon as a boy is about to enter the school a letter is sent to his parents advising them to give the boy instruction, and a pamphlet is enclosed for this purpose.  This plan has the decided advantage of shifting the responsibility on to the shoulders of those who ought to take it.  The weakness of the plan arises from the fact that most parents do not believe in the prevalence of impurity among boys, and are quite confident that their own boys need no warning.  Hence they may do nothing at all, or merely content themselves with some vague and quite useless statement.

The traditions of most boys’ schools make it impossible for those intimate and respectful relations to exist between masters and boys without which confidential teaching of this kind may be even worse than useless.  Where masters are invariably referred to disrespectfully if not contemptuously, where a teacher’s most earnest address is a “jaw” which the recipient is expected to betray and mock at with his companions; where to shield profanity, indecency, and bullying from detection is the imperative duty of every boy below the Sixth; where failure to avert from a moral leper the kindly treatment which might restore him to health and prevent the wholesale infection of others is the one unpardonable sin, only one or two teachers of a generation can hope to do much, and the risk of failure is immense.  I can hardly believe that the present race of teachers will long tolerate the system I here advert to.  Public opinion can be organised and enlisted as strongly on the side of Right as it is now, but too often, on the side of Evil.  Mr. A.C.  Benson is very moderate when he writes:  “To take no steps to arrive at such an organisation, and to leave it severely alone, is a very dark responsibility.”

Even in such a school, some good is, I know, done by tactful public references to the existence of masturbation and to its deplorable consequences.

The question is not free from difficulty even when the general atmosphere of the school is healthy and helpful.  If one dared to leave this instruction until the age of puberty, the lad would be capable of a much deeper impression than he is at an earlier age, and the impression would be fresh just at the time at which it is most needed.  In the case of boys who have come to me at nine or ten I have sometimes ventured to defer my interview for four or five years, and have found them quite uncorrupted.  On the other hand, within an hour of penning these lines I have been talking to a little boy of eleven who commenced masturbation two years ago while he was under excellent home influence.  One such boy may, without guilt, corrupt a whole set, for impurity