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Page 21
Speaking of those commoner forms of impurity to which I have referred,
and which are so mischievous as stimulating immature functions, needing,
as Acton over and over again insists, absolute quiet and rest for
healthy development, Dr. Dukes, the head physician of one of our best
known public schools, states: "The reason why it is so widespread an
evil"--computed in 1886 at eighty per cent. of boys at school, a
computation accepted by a committee of public schoolmasters--"I believe
to be, that the boy leaves home in the first instance without one word
of warning from his parents that he will meet with bad boys who will
tell him that everybody does it, and thus he falls into evil ways from
his innocence and ignorance alone."[12]
Dr. Dukes further states that as the results of his thirty years'
experience he had come to the conclusion that only one per cent. of
parents ever warned their boys at all before sending them to school.
These statements were made some fifteen years ago, when first the
conspiracy of silence was broken through and the question of the
morality of our public and private schools was dragged into the light of
day and boldly faced and grappled with, largely owing to the action of
Dr. Pusey. Since then a mass of strenuous effort has been directed
against the evil by our high-minded head-masters; and an immense
improvement has been effected. It is too short a time for one to hope
that the evil has been eradicated; but when parents learn to fulfil
their moral duties of teaching and warning their own boys--as Dr. Dukes
observes--I feel sure it could be so far removed as to cause the numbers
to change places, so that we might obtain a percentage of ninety to
ninety-five of those who lead pure lives while at school, as against
five per cent, who are impure, reversing the lamentable ratio that now
exists. But here again there has been progress, and I feel sure that the
percentage of parents who do warn and teach their sons before sending
them to school is now incomparably higher than Dr. Dukes's "one per
cent." and is steadily rising.
As to other deeper and nameless evils, they have been already reduced to
a minimum, and if fathers could only be persuaded to do their duty by
their own boys, they might be made wholly to disappear.
I give you these facts about our English schools, that parents may see
for themselves what are the consequences of refusing both teaching and
warning to their boys, under the delusion that God's lilies will grow up
in the weedy garden of the human heart without strenuous culture and
training.
Do not, therefore, I beseech you, take for granted that your
boarding-schools are entirely free from such evils. You have the same
conditions that we have. Till lately your boys have been as untaught and
unwarned as ours. In your boarding-schools, as in ours, they are removed
from the purifying influence of mother and sisters. They are just at the
age which has neither the delicacy of childhood nor of early manhood.
Rest assured that conditions will breed like results.
"My belief, not lightly formed," says Dr. Butler,[13] "is, that
none of the great schools can congratulate themselves on anything
like safety from this danger. And if this is true of the great
public schools, it is still more true of private schools, where the
evil is admittedly greater. Boys and masters alike may strangely
deceive themselves; the evil may hide very close. Many a boy has
been known to assert positively and honestly that nothing of the
kind was ever heard of in his time, and that any fellow suspected
of it would have been cut, and half killed, when all the time the
evil was actively at work even among the circle of his intimate
friends."
And yet it is this evil, so pervasive in its influence, so certain to
taint the fresh springs of young life with impure knowledge, if not to
foul them with unclean acts, that parents still too often elect to
ignore. The boy, full of eager curiosity, anxious, above all things, to
catch up the ways of the other fellows, afraid, above all things, of
being laughed at for his innocence, and elated at being taken up by one
of the swells in the shape of an elder boy, and at first set-off wholly
ignorant of the motive; exposed to suggestions about the functions of
his own body which he has not the knowledge to rebut as the devil's
lies--what wonder is it that so many boys, originally good and pure,
fall victims? "They blunder like blind puppies into sin," a medical man
who has had much to do with boys' schools exclaimed to me in the
bitterness of his soul. The small house of the young boy's soul, full of
the song of birds, the fresh babble of the voices of sisters, all the
innocent sights and sounds of an English or American home, swept and
garnished till now by such loving hands, but left empty, unguarded, and
unwatched, for the unclean spirit to lift the latch and enter in and
take possession--the pity of it! oh, the pity of it! What can the boy
think? To quote Dr. Dukes again:
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