Here let me give you two most earnest cautions.  Do not attach too much importance to mere mechanical arrangements as moral safeguards.  One of our most successful head-masters says: 

“I would most seriously warn any parent anxious about the choice of a school not to attach much weight to the apparent excellence of arrangements.  Some of the worst schools have these arrangements in the highest perfection.  They cannot afford to have them otherwise.  Neat cubicles and spotless dimity have beguiled an uninterrupted sequence of mammas, and have kept alive, and even flourishing, schools which are in a thoroughly bad moral state and are hopelessly inefficient in every particular.  Of course, many a parent feels that he ought to judge for himself, and these mechanical arrangements are too often the only material on which he can form his judgment.  Let me assure him that they are entirely untrustworthy.”

Secondly, do not think to find safety in the choice of a so-called “religious” school, even though it reflect the exact shade of your own religious opinions.  The worst evils I ever knew went on in a school where the boys implicated held a weekly prayer-meeting!  We must boldly face the fact that there is some mysterious connection between the religious emotions and the lower animal nature; and the religious forcing-house, of whatever school of theology, will always be liable to prove a hot-bed of impurity.  Choose a school with a high moral tone, with religion as an underlying principle—­a practical religion, that inculcates duty rather than fosters emotion, and embodies the wise proverb of Solomon, “In all labor there is profit, but the talk of the lips tendeth to penury.”

Only let me beseech you to use your whole influence not to have your boy sent away at too early an age.  Do you really think that the exclusive society of little boys, with their childish chatter, their foolish little codes, their crude and often ridiculously false notions of life, and their small curiosities, naturally inquisitive, but not always clean in the researches they inspire, and always false in their results, is morally better for your child than, in Dr. Butler’s words,

“the refining and purifying atmosphere of home, with the tenderness of a mother, the grace and playfulness of sisters, the love and loyalty of the family nurse, and lastly—­scarcely to be distinguished in its effects from these influences—­the sweetness, the simplicity, the flower-picking, the pony-patting of happy, frolicsome younger brothers or sisters in the garden, the paddock, or stable?”

If the boy has got out of hand, I ask, Whose fault is that? and is it fair to the child that your fault should be remedied by sending him away from all that is best and most purifying in child life?  I would plead earnestly that eleven or twelve is old enough for the private school, and that a boy should not be sent to a public school before fourteen.  In