s
popularly supposed that self-abuse and sexual intercourse are
antagonistic--by many, the one is regarded as a necessary alternative of
the other. So far from being a protective, the former is a most powerful
provocative of the latter. According to my own observation, it is not the
strongly sexed, the most virile young men, who are most given to
licentiousness, but those whose organs have been rendered weak and
irritable from this unnatural exercise--in whom the habit of sensual
indulgence has been set up, and in whom self-control has not been
developed by exercise."[44] This combination of silence, misinformation,
and bad influence causes a damnable attitude of mind on the part of the
boy toward women, love, marriage, and the home.[45]

The experience of a Chicago business man with his sixteen-year-old son is
told in a recent popular magazine. Whether an actual occurrence or not, it
is typical of conditions in most any city.

I do not desire to convey the idea that our boy was a wicked boy. He
was not. He was just the average type of what we call the "upper
middle-class" boy. He was merely tuned to the low moral tone of the
city. Vice to him was not a monster of hideous mien. He had seen it
from childhood.... I knew that a greater part of his ideas on
patriotism, on women, on the sanctity of marriage were but reflections
of views he had heard expressed, often tritely and cleverly, and
cynicism born of hearing such things flaunted over the footlights or
dished out as "clever" in the newspapers.

In the father's earnest efforts to understand the remedy for the
situation, he is reminded of his own experience when he began life in the
city. He continues:--

The boy's words awakened memories. I recalled the sense of shocked and
shamed decency I felt when first I came to the city, a boy almost, and
fresh from the country; how I tossed in my bed trying to see as right
things that every one in the city appeared to accept as a matter of
course, but that, from earliest boyhood I had been taught to regard as
wicked. I could not for many months become accustomed to seeing
immodestly dressed women on or off the stage, or to hearing
half-veiled indecency flaunted from the stage, blazoned in the
newspapers, or used even in ordinary conversation. I could not get
used to ... scenes and actions directly forbidden as unforgivable at
home.[46]

We are h