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.

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 eff