to be trusted here, as mothers cannot betray the confidence of their own boys, and often fail in gaining their consent to let the head-master know what is going on, in the boy’s natural dread of being found out as the source of the information and, according to the ruling code, cut, as having “peached.”  Once I obtained leave to expose an indescribable state of things which was going on in broad daylight in an unsupervised room at one of our great public schools, utterly unsuspected by the head-master, and his subordinate, the house-master.  But another case which for long made my life a kind of waking nightmare remained unexposed to the last.

Speaking of those commoner forms of impurity to which I have referred, and which are so mischievous as stimulating immature functions, needing, as Acton over and over again insists, absolute quiet and rest for healthy development, Dr. Dukes, the head physician of one of our best known public schools, states:  “The reason why it is so widespread an evil”—­computed in 1886 at eighty per cent. of boys at school, a computation accepted by a committee of public schoolmasters—­“I believe to be, that the boy leaves home in the first instance without one word of warning from his parents that he will meet with bad boys who will tell him that everybody does it, and thus he falls into evil ways from his innocence and ignorance alone."[12]

Dr. Dukes further states that as the results of his thirty years’ experience he had come to the conclusion that only one per cent. of parents ever warned their boys at all before sending them to school.

These statements were made some fifteen years ago, when first the conspiracy of silence was broken through and the question of the morality of our public and private schools was dragged into the light of day and boldly faced and grappled with, largely owing to the action of Dr. Pusey.  Since then a mass of strenuous effort has been directed against the evil by our high-minded head-masters; and an immense improvement has been effected.  It is too short a time for one to hope that the evil has been eradicated; but when parents learn to fulfil their moral duties of teaching and warning their own boys—­as Dr. Dukes observes—­I feel sure it could be so far removed as to cause the numbers to change places, so that we might obtain a percentage of ninety to ninety-five of those who lead pure lives while at school, as against five per cent, who are impure, reversing the lamentable ratio that now exists.  But here again there has been progress, and I feel sure that the percentage of parents who do warn and teach their sons before sending them to school is now incomparably higher than Dr. Dukes’s “one per cent.” and is steadily rising.

As to other deeper and nameless evils, they have been already reduced to a minimum, and if fathers could only be persuaded to do their duty by their own boys, they might be made wholly to disappear.

I give you these facts about our English schools, that parents may see for themselves what are the consequences of refusing both teaching and warning to their boys, under the delusion that God’s lilies will grow up in the weedy garden of the human heart without strenuous culture and training.