But here let me guard myself from being misunderstood.  I am not making out that every schoolboy is exposed to these temptations; there are boys so exceptionally endowed that they seem to spread a pure atmosphere around them which is respected by even the coarsest and loosest boys in the school.  All I do maintain, with Dr. Butler, is that no school is safe from this danger, that at any time it may prove an active one in your boy’s life, and that at the very least you have to guard him from impure knowledge being thrust upon him before nature has developed the instincts of manhood by which she guards her inner shrine.

And now I come to the question of day schools.  As I have already said, I cannot feel but they are more consonant with the order of our life as giving the discipline and competition of numbers without removing the boy from family life, nor do they lend themselves to some of the graver evils of our boarding-schools.  But, alas! in themselves they form no panacea for the evils we are contemplating.  On the contrary, I am told on authority I cannot question that in some places this plague spot is rife among them.  In one case the evil had struck so wide and deep that the school had to be temporarily closed.  Here, again, the same lesson is emphasized, viz.:  that whatever is the form of the school, however excellent the teacher, there is no substitute in the moral life for the home teaching and training of mothers and fathers.

No mother can read these statements unmoved—­statements, remember, not my own, but made by men of the deepest and widest experience, and which, therefore, you are bound to weigh, ponder, and carefully consider.  I know that straight from your heart again comes the cry, “What can I do?”

I am inclined to answer this cry in one word, “Everything,”—­with God’s help.

I

And now let us enter into practical details.  We will begin with the outworks, and work our way inwards to the shrine.

First, as to the all-important choice of a school, should the boy’s father decide, for reasons in which you concur to send him to a boarding-school.

As to how to ascertain the real state of a school there is, of course, considerable difficulty.  I have always found the best way is through mothers who have gained the confidence of their boys and who know through them what really goes on.  In this way, as mothers wake up to the danger their boys run and to their own responsibility in guarding them, we shall be able to help one another more and more.  But make a point of yourself, as well as the boy’s father, personally seeing the master to whom you think of entrusting your lad, and talking over the matter with him.  In this way you will not only satisfy yourself, but you will strengthen his hands by making him feel how vital the whole question is to your heart.  What more than anything else weakens the high-minded men who have the tuition of the young is the utter unconcern that is evinced by the parents and the sense that, by the payment of a sum of money down, they can compound with a master for the performance of their inalienable duty of undertaking the moral education of their own children.