to himself; both of them will be under the guardianship of fear and shame, the constant companions of a first passion; they will not proceed at once to misconduct, and they will not have time to come to it gradually without hindrance.  If he behaves otherwise, he must have taken lessons from his comrades, he must have learned from them to despise his self-control, and to imitate their boldness.  But there is no one in the whole world so little given to imitation as Emile.  What man is there who is so little influenced by mockery as one who has no prejudices himself and yields nothing to the prejudices of others.  I have laboured twenty years to arm him against mockery; they will not make him their dupe in a day; for in his eyes ridicule is the argument of fools, and nothing makes one less susceptible to raillery than to be beyond the influence of prejudice.  Instead of jests he must have arguments, and while he is in this frame of mind, I am not afraid that he will be carried away by young fools; conscience and truth are on my side.  If prejudice is to enter into the matter at all, an affection of twenty years’ standing counts for something; no one will ever convince him that I have wearied him with vain lessons; and in a heart so upright and so sensitive the voice of a tried and trusted friend will soon efface the shouts of twenty libertines.  As it is therefore merely a question of showing him that he is deceived, that while they pretend to treat him as a man they are really treating him as a child, I shall choose to be always simple but serious and plain in my arguments, so that he may feel that I do indeed treat him as a man.  I will say to him, You will see that your welfare, in which my own is bound up, compels me to speak; I can do nothing else.  But why do these young men want to persuade you?  Because they desire to seduce you; they do not care for you, they take no real interest in you; their only motive is a secret spite because they see you are better than they; they want to drag you down to their own level, and they only reproach you with submitting to control that they may themselves control you.  Do you think you have anything to gain by this?  Are they so much wiser than I, is the affection of a day stronger than mine?  To give any weight to their jests they must give weight to their authority; and by what experience do they support their maxima above ours?  They have only followed the example of other giddy youths, as they would have you follow theirs.  To escape from the so-called prejudices of their fathers, they yield to those of their comrades.  I cannot see that they are any the better off; but I see that they lose two things of value—­the affection of their parents, whose advice is that of tenderness and truth, and the wisdom of experience which teaches us to judge by what we know; for their fathers have once been young, but the young men have never been fathers.