stigation. The physicians and
masters of public schools who are in a position to study the matter
usually possess no psychological training, and appear to view
homosexuality with too much disgust to care to pay any careful attention
to it. What knowledge they possess they keep to themselves, for it is
considered to be in the interests of public schools that these things
should be hushed up. When anything very scandalous occurs one or two lads
are expelled, to their own grave and, perhaps, lifelong injury, and
without benefit to those who remain, whose awakening sexual life rarely
receives intelligent sympathy.

In several of the Histories which follow in this chapter, as well
as in Histories contained in other volumes of these _Studies_,
details will be found concerning homosexuality as it occurs in
English schools, public or private. (See also the study
"Auto-erotism" in vol. i.) The prevalence of homosexual and
erotic phenomena in schools varies greatly at different schools
and at different times in the same school, while in small private
schools such phenomena may be entirely unknown. As an English
schoolboy I never myself saw or heard anything of such practices,
and in Germany, Professor Gurlitt (_Die Neue Generation_,
January, 1909), among others, testifies to similar absence of
experience during his whole school life, although there was much
talk and joking among the boys over sexual things. I have added
some observations by a correspondent whose experiences of English
public school life are still recent:--

"In the years I was a member of a public school, I saw and heard
a good deal of homosexuality, though till my last two years I did
not understand its meaning. As a prefect, I discussed with other
prefects the methods of checking it, and of punishing it when
detected. My own observations, supported by those of others, led
me to think that the fault of the usual method of dealing with
homosexuality in schools is that it regards all school
homosexualists as being in one class together, and has only one
way of dealing with them--the birch for a first offense,
expulsion for a second. Now, I think we may distinguish _three_
classes of school homosexualists:--

"(a) A very small number who are probably radically inverted, and
who do not scruple to sacrifice young and innocent boys to their
passions.