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Page 20
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 8: This is the case with our recognized medical manuals; I do
not know whether it is equally true of American manuals.]
[Footnote 9: Vol. ii. See chapter on "The Position of Women."]
[Footnote 10: _Sartor Resartus_, by Thomas Carlyle, Book II., chap, ii.,
p. 68. Chapman and Hall, 1831.]
CHAPTER VI
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL LIFE
I now come to what must always be the great moral crux in a boy's life,
that on which all the higher issues of his character will, in all human
probability, turn--his school life. One of our great educators took
what, looked at superficially, seemed the somewhat retrograde step of
giving up the mastership of a college at Oxford to take again the
head-mastership of a great public school. But in a conversation I had
with him he led me to infer that he had done so from the conviction
forced upon him that the whole moral trend of the character must be
given, if given at all, prior to university life, at the public school;
and to him nothing less than the formation of high moral character
seemed worth striving for. Fine scholarship and high mathematics are
excellent, but after all, as the apostle of culture, Matthew Arnold, has
told us, conduct, and not intellectual attainment, forms seven-tenths of
life.
Now, it is in connection with your boy's school life that you will have
your greatest dangers to face, your hardest battle to fight.
I am, of course, aware that your school system is in some respects
different from ours. You have the mixed day school such as largely
obtains in Scotland, but which does not exist, at least for the upper
classes, in England. You have private boarding-schools, which with us
are called preparatory schools, as they form the vestibule to the public
school. And you have, lastly, a few large public schools somewhat on the
model of Eton and Harrow.
Let us begin with the boarding-school. I do not intend for one moment to
deny the advantages of our great English public schools. They are
excellent for discipline and the formation of strong character,
especially for a ruling race like ours; and their very numerical
strength and importance command a splendid set of men as masters. But
both public and private boarding-schools labor under one great
disadvantage: they remove a boy from all family influence and violate
the order of our life, which can never be violated with impunity. Boys
and girls are sent into the world in pretty equal proportions, and we
were never intended to pile a lot of boys together without girls and
largely without any feminine influence whatever. To do so is to insure
moral disorder whether in our schools or yours. To quote from an
excellent paper of Dr. Butler's: "In giving us sisters," says one of the
Hares in _Guesses at Truth_, "God gave us the best moral antiseptic,"
and it is their absence more than anything else that has produced the
moral problems which our boarding-schools present. To be absent from
sisters for the greater part of the year, at an age when their
companionship is perhaps the most eloquent of silent appeals to purity,
is undoubtedly one of the greatest evils to be set against the blessings
of our public schools.[11]
For my own part, I can only say that the one thing which has filled me
at times with the darkness of despair has not been the facts about our
back streets, not those facts to meet which we hold conferences and
establish penitentiaries, refuges, preventive homes, etc.--I am full of
hopefulness about them--but the facts about our public, and still more
about our private, schools, which until lately have been met with dead
silence and masterly inactivity on the part of English parents. On the
part of mothers I feel sure it is ignorance, not indifference: if they
knew what I know, it simply could not be the latter. Even now, when
some, at least, of their ignorance has been dispelled, I doubt whether
they realize the depth of moral corruption which is to be found in our
public and private schools; the existence of heathen vices which by the
law of our land are treated as felony, and which we would fain hope,
after nineteen centuries of Christianity, might now be relegated to the
first chapter of Romans. They do not realize the presence of other and
commoner forms of impurity, the self-defilement which taints the moral
nature and stimulates the lower nature into unhealthy and abnormal
activity. They do not understand the essentially sporadic nature of the
evil--that it may exist "as a pestilence that walketh in darkness" in
one boarding-school, while another, owing to the influence of a good set
of boys, is comparatively free from it; and they will, therefore, take a
single denial of its existence, possibly from their own husbands, as
conclusive. Even the affirmations of head-masters are not altogether to
be trusted here, as mothers cannot betray the confidence of their own
boys, and often fail in gaining their consent to let the head-master
know what is going on, in the boy's natural dread of being found out as
the source of the information and, according to the ruling code, cut, as
having "peached." Once I obtained leave to expose an indescribable state
of things which was going on in broad daylight in an unsupervised room
at one of our great public schools, utterly unsuspected by the
head-master, and his subordinate, the house-master. But another case
which for long made my life a kind of waking nightmare remained
unexposed to the last.
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