Do not, therefore, I beseech you, take for granted that your boarding-schools are entirely free from such evils.  You have the same conditions that we have.  Till lately your boys have been as untaught and unwarned as ours.  In your boarding-schools, as in ours, they are removed from the purifying influence of mother and sisters.  They are just at the age which has neither the delicacy of childhood nor of early manhood.  Rest assured that conditions will breed like results.

“My belief, not lightly formed,” says Dr. Butler,[13] “is, that none of the great schools can congratulate themselves on anything like safety from this danger.  And if this is true of the great public schools, it is still more true of private schools, where the evil is admittedly greater.  Boys and masters alike may strangely deceive themselves; the evil may hide very close.  Many a boy has been known to assert positively and honestly that nothing of the kind was ever heard of in his time, and that any fellow suspected of it would have been cut, and half killed, when all the time the evil was actively at work even among the circle of his intimate friends.”

And yet it is this evil, so pervasive in its influence, so certain to taint the fresh springs of young life with impure knowledge, if not to foul them with unclean acts, that parents still too often elect to ignore.  The boy, full of eager curiosity, anxious, above all things, to catch up the ways of the other fellows, afraid, above all things, of being laughed at for his innocence, and elated at being taken up by one of the swells in the shape of an elder boy, and at first set-off wholly ignorant of the motive; exposed to suggestions about the functions of his own body which he has not the knowledge to rebut as the devil’s lies—­what wonder is it that so many boys, originally good and pure, fall victims?  “They blunder like blind puppies into sin,” a medical man who has had much to do with boys’ schools exclaimed to me in the bitterness of his soul.  The small house of the young boy’s soul, full of the song of birds, the fresh babble of the voices of sisters, all the innocent sights and sounds of an English or American home, swept and garnished till now by such loving hands, but left empty, unguarded, and unwatched, for the unclean spirit to lift the latch and enter in and take possession—­the pity of it! oh, the pity of it!  What can the boy think?  To quote Dr. Dukes again: 

“He will say to himself:  ’My father knows of all this vice at schools, and yet has not said one word to me about it.  He has warned me about most things.  He told me to be truthful, to keep my temper, to be upright and manly, to say my prayers; he pressed me never to get into debt, never to drink, and never to use bad language; and he told me I ought to change my boots and clothes when wet, so as not to get ill; and yet he has not said one syllable about this.  My father is a good man and loves me, and