The female line, where it differs from the male, is the dotted line, the greater or less probability or value of life being shown by the greater or less distance of the line of life from the level line at the bottom.  Infant life being very fragile, the line steadily rises till it reaches its highest point, between thirteen and fourteen.  In both cases there is then a rapid fall, the age of puberty being a critical age.  But from fifteen, when the female line begins to right itself, only showing by a gentle curve downwards the added risks of the child-bearing period in a woman’s life, the male line, which ought, without these risks, to keep above the female line, makes a sharp dip below it, till it reaches its lowest point at twenty-five, the age when the excesses of youth have had time to tell most on the system.[1] Here, at least, is evidence that none can gainsay.  The more you ponder that mysterious sharp dip in the man’s line of life at the very age which Nature intended should be the prime and flower of life, the more deeply you will feel that some deep and hidden danger lies concealed there, the more earnestly you will come to the conclusion that you cannot and will not thrust from you the responsibility that rests upon you as the boy’s mother of helping to guard him from it.  Keep him from the knowledge of evil, and the temptations that come with that knowledge, you cannot.  The few first days at school will insure that, to say nothing of the miserable streets of our large towns.  As Thackeray long ago said in a well-known passage, much animadverted on at the time: 

“And by the way, ye tender mothers and sober fathers of Christian families, a prodigious thing that theory of life is, as orally learnt at a great public school.  Why! if you could hear those boys of fourteen who blush before their mothers, and sneak off in silence in the presence of their daughters, talking among each other, it would be the woman’s turn to blush then.  Before Pen was twelve years old, and while his mother thought him an angel of candour, little Pen had heard enough to make him quite awfully wise upon certain points; and so, madam, has your pretty rosy-cheeked son who is coming home from school for the ensuing Christmas holidays.  I don’t say that the boy is lost, or that the innocence has left him which he had ‘from heaven, which is our home,’ but that the shades of the prison house are closing very fast round him, and that we are helping as much as possible to corrupt him."[2]

But though you cannot keep him from the knowledge of evil, you can be a potent factor in teaching him the hidden dangers that beset him, in seeing that his young feet rest on the rock of true knowledge, and not on the shifting quagmire of the devil’s lies; but above all, in inspiring him with a high ideal of conduct, which will make him shrink from everything low and foul as he would from card-sharping or sneaking, proving yourself thus to him as far as in you lies—­