Let us begin with the boarding-school.  I do not intend for one moment to deny the advantages of our great English public schools.  They are excellent for discipline and the formation of strong character, especially for a ruling race like ours; and their very numerical strength and importance command a splendid set of men as masters.  But both public and private boarding-schools labor under one great disadvantage:  they remove a boy from all family influence and violate the order of our life, which can never be violated with impunity.  Boys and girls are sent into the world in pretty equal proportions, and we were never intended to pile a lot of boys together without girls and largely without any feminine influence whatever.  To do so is to insure moral disorder whether in our schools or yours.  To quote from an excellent paper of Dr. Butler’s:  “In giving us sisters,” says one of the Hares in Guesses at Truth, “God gave us the best moral antiseptic,” and it is their absence more than anything else that has produced the moral problems which our boarding-schools present.  To be absent from sisters for the greater part of the year, at an age when their companionship is perhaps the most eloquent of silent appeals to purity, is undoubtedly one of the greatest evils to be set against the blessings of our public schools.[11]

For my own part, I can only say that the one thing which has filled me at times with the darkness of despair has not been the facts about our back streets, not those facts to meet which we hold conferences and establish penitentiaries, refuges, preventive homes, etc.—­I am full of hopefulness about them—­but the facts about our public, and still more about our private, schools, which until lately have been met with dead silence and masterly inactivity on the part of English parents.  On the part of mothers I feel sure it is ignorance, not indifference:  if they knew what I know, it simply could not be the latter.  Even now, when some, at least, of their ignorance has been dispelled, I doubt whether they realize the depth of moral corruption which is to be found in our public and private schools; the existence of heathen vices which by the law of our land are treated as felony, and which we would fain hope, after nineteen centuries of Christianity, might now be relegated to the first chapter of Romans.  They do not realize the presence of other and commoner forms of impurity, the self-defilement which taints the moral nature and stimulates the lower nature into unhealthy and abnormal activity.  They do not understand the essentially sporadic nature of the evil—­that it may exist “as a pestilence that walketh in darkness” in one boarding-school, while another, owing to the influence of a good set of boys, is comparatively free from it; and they will, therefore, take a single denial of its existence, possibly from their own husbands, as conclusive.  Even the affirmations of head-masters are not altogether