nstant
employment, reduce the evil of prurient talk to a minimum, yet these
subjects _will_ crop up.... It should be remembered that the boys who
are talkative about such subjects are just those whose ideas are most
distorted and vicious. In the public school, owing not only to freer
talk and more mixed company but to the boy's own wider range of
vision, sexual questions, and also those connected with the structure
of the body, come to the fore and begin to occupy more or less of the
thoughts of all but a peculiarly constituted minority of the whole
number.

"Men, as I have shown, have been severely dealt with by Nature in this
respect: she has forced them, at a time of life when their minds are
ill compacted, their ideas chaotic, and their wills untrained, to face
an ordeal which demands above all things reverence based on knowledge
and resolution sustained by high affections. An _enormously large
proportion_ flounder blindly into the mire before they know what it
is, not necessarily, but very often into the defilement of evil habit,
but, still more often, into the tainted air of diseased opinion, and
after a few years _some of them_ emerge saved, but so as by fire."[B]

[Footnote B: Pages 4 _et seq._: the italics are mine.]

The following are quotations from the _Upton Letters_, written by Mr.
A.C. Benson. Mr. Benson is one of the most distinguished of modern
teachers: he has had long experience of public-school life both as a
boy and as a master: he has that insight into the heart of boyhood
which can come only to one who has affectionate sympathy with boys and
has been the recipient of their confidences. It will be abundantly
evident from the passages which follow that in Mr. Benson's opinion no
boy is likely to preserve his "innocence" in passing through a public
school.

"The subject is so unpleasant that many masters dare not speak of it
at all, and excuse themselves by saying that they don't want to put
ideas into boys' heads. I cannot conscientiously believe that a man
who has been through a big public school himself can honestly be
afraid of that." "The standard of purity is low: a vicious boy does
not find his vicious tendencies by any means a bar to social success."
This, of course, assumes that the vicious tendencies are a matter of
notoriety. A similar implication is involved in the following: "I do
not mean to say that there are not many boys who are both pure-minded
and honest; but they treat such v