in the mists of innuendo or blazoned forth in the shamelessness of bestiality?  There is really no answer but one to such a question, and the plain truth is that fathers, perhaps still more mothers, must recognize the duty which lies upon them to teach their children, at such times, in such words, and with such reservations as the character of each child may suggest, the elements at least of that knowledge which will otherwise be learnt but a very little later from a widely different set of instructors.  I lay down the principle as admitting of no exception—­I do not anticipate even one dissentient voice from any who now hear me—­that no boy ought ever to be allowed to go to school without learning from his father or his mother, or from some brother or tried friend considerably older than himself the simple facts as to the laws of birth and the terrible danger of ever coming to talk of these phenomena as matters of frivolous and filthy conversation.”

I can only beseech you to give due weight to these words of one who had many years’ experience of a large public school.  Over and over again, at all my meetings of educated mothers, I have reiterated his question in similar words, “Is it right, is it fair, that your boy should learn the sacred mysteries of life and birth from the sources which Dr. Butler enumerates, and to which you abandon him, if you refuse to speak; sources of unclean and lying information by which I have no hesitation in saying that the mind and conscience of many men are more or less permanently defiled, even when the life has been kept outwardly pure?” Can you hesitate for one moment to allow that the springs of the life which you will be the first to acknowledge comes from God should well up from a pure source, till, like Wordsworth’s stream—­

                    “Crowned with flowers,
    The mountain infant to the sun laughs forth,”

and that the whole subject should be so bound up in the boy’s mind with his father’s love for his mother, his mother’s love for his father, with his own existence, and that of his sisters, that he would shrink with utter loathing from the filthy so-called “secrets” that are bandied about among schoolboys?  I know that the task of conveying this knowledge presents many difficulties, but again I ask, “What is there in our life that is worth doing which is not difficult?” Long ago the definition of a difficulty to me has become “a thing to be overcome.”  It is not in sitting down helplessly before a difficulty that the way will open.  With us, as with the Israelites on the brink of that raging midnight sea, it is in a brave obedience to the Divine command, “Go forward!” that the path opens through the trackless sea, and we find that the great waters that seem ready to overwhelm us are in reality a baptism into new life.

III

Again I seem almost to hear the cry of your heart, “I know I ought to speak to my boy, but how am I to do it?”