“a beastly shame,” and fight it both in themselves and in others, for our sakes as well as their own.  For the misery as things are is this:—­that men divide us into two classes—­we pure women for whom nothing is too good; and those others, whom they never associate with us, for whom nothing is too bad.  And what we have to teach them is this—­that our womanhood is ONE that a sin against them is a sin against us, and so to link the thought of us to them that for the sake of their own mothers, for the sake of their own sisters, above all, for the sake of the future wife, they cannot wrong or degrade a woman or keep up a degraded class of women.

I am aware that, besides the suggestions I have made, young men require a plain, emphatic warning as to the physical dangers of licentiousness and of the possibility of contracting a taint which medical science is now pronouncing to be ineradicable and which they will transmit in some form or other to their children after them.  We want a strong cord made up of every strand we can lay hold of, and one of these strands is doubtless self-preservation, though in impulsive youth I do not think it the strongest.  But to give these warnings is manifestly the father’s duty, and not the mother’s; and I hope and believe that the number of fathers who are beginning to recognize their duty in this matter, as moral teachers of their boys, is steadily increasing.  In the case of widowed mothers, or where the father absolutely refuses to say anything, perhaps the paper I have already mentioned, Medical Testimony,[29] would be the best substitute for the father’s living voice.

And now let me conclude this chapter, as I concluded the last, with a few scattered practical suggestions which may prove of use.  My experience has been that the vast majority of our young men go wrong not from any vicious tendencies, but from want of thought, want of knowledge, and a consequent yielding to the low moral tone of so-called men of the world, and the fear of being chaffed as “an innocent.”  See that your boy is guarded from this want of thought and want of knowledge.  When your son is a Sixth Form boy—­it is impossible to give the age more definitely, as it must depend upon the character of the boy—­place in his hands the White Cross paper, True Manliness which will give him the facts about his own manhood.  This paper was carefully revised by the late Bishop of Durham, Dr. Lightfoot, whose specialty was young men; and upwards of a million copies have been sold, which in itself guarantees it as a safe paper.  Nor need you as a mother of sons fear to read over any of the White Cross papers, since they concern themselves, as their name denotes, with purity and a high ideal of life—­not with the sewer, but with the fountain of sweet waters.