I answer that a mother must know by what standard she is to educate her boy, and therefore must have the data supplied to her on which to form her own judgment, and be fully persuaded in her own mind what she is to aim at in the training she is to give him; and the mere fact that the current judgment of men involves the sacrifice in body and soul of a large class of our fellow-women lays a paramount obligation upon all women to search for themselves into the truth and scientific accuracy of the premises on which that judgment is based.

“Can men keep their health and strength as celibates till such time as they have the means to marry?” is the question we have, then, to face.  Is the standard of the moral law possible to men who have to maintain a high level of physical efficiency in the sharp competition of modern life?

Primarily, the answer to this question must come from the acknowledged heads of the medical profession.  Now, I am thankful to say, we have in England a consensus of opinion from the representative men of the faculty that no one can gainsay.  Sir James Paget, Acton in his great text-book, Sir Andrew Clark, Sir George Humphrey, of Cambridge, Professor Millar, of the Edinburgh University, Sir William Gowers, F.R.S., have all answered the above question in the strongest affirmative.  “Chastity does no harm to body or mind; its discipline is excellent; marriage may safely be waited for,” are Sir James Paget’s terse and emphatic words[4].  Still more emphatic are the words of Sir William Gowers, the great men’s specialist, who counts as an authority on the Continent as well as here: 

“The opinions which on grounds falsely called ‘physiological’ suggest or permit unchastity are terribly prevalent among young men, but they are absolutely false.  With all the force of any knowledge I possess, and any authority I have, I assert that this belief is contrary to fact; I assert that no man ever yet was in the slightest degree or way the worse for continence or better for incontinence.  From incontinence during unmarried life all are worse morally; a clear majority, are, in the end, worse physically; and in no small number the result is, and ever will be, utter physical shipwreck on one of the many rocks, sharp, jagged-edged, which beset the way, or on one of the banks of festering slime which no care can possibly avoid.  They are rocks which tear and rend the unhappy being who is driven against them when he has yielded to the tide of passion, they are banks which exhale a poison for which, no true antidote exists.”

In face of such testimony as this, well might Mr. George Russell, in an address to young men, speak of “this exploded lie which has hitherto led so many astray.”