ards a lad who has admitted impurity in his
life but retains reverence for purity, it is hard to feel anything but
repulsion towards one who profanes the subject of sex with coarse and
ribald talk.

As a result of the two evils of which I have now spoken, together with
the physical effects of masturbation, young men become powerless to
face the sexual temptations of manhood; and many, who in all other
relations of life are admirable, sink in this matter into the mire of
prostitution or the less demoralising, but far crueller, sin of
seduction.

Thrown on the streets, usually through no fault of her own, often
merely from an over-trustful love, the prostitute sinks to the lowest
depths of degradation and despair. It is not merely that she sells to
every comer, clean or bestial, without even the excuse of appetite or
of passion, what should be yielded alone to love; but it is also that
to do this she poisons body and mind with spirit-drinking, leads a
life of demoralising indolence and self-indulgence, is cut off from
all decent associations, and sinks, under the combined influence of
these things and of fell disease, into a loathsome creature whom not
the lowest wants; sinks into destitution, misery, suicide, or the
outcast's early grave. Writing of the young man who is familiar with
London, the Headmaster of Eton says: "He cannot fail to see around him
a whole world of ruined life--a ghastly varnish of gaiety spread over
immeasurable tracts of death and corruption; a state of things so
heart-rending and so hopeless that on calm consideration of it the
brain reels, and sober-minded people who, from motives of pity, have
looked the hideous evil in the face, have asserted that nothing in
their experience has seemed to threaten them so nearly with a loss of
reason."

Into the contamination of this inferno, into active support of this
cruel infamy, many and many a young man is led by the impurity of his
boyhood. Such at least is the conclusion of some who know boys best.
Thus Dr. Dukes writes:

"This evil, of which I have spoken so long and so freely, is, I
believe, _the root of the evil of prostitution_ and similar vices; and
if this latter evil is to be mitigated, it can only be, to my mind,
by making the life of the schoolboy purer.

"How is it possible to put a stop to this terrible social evil? How is
it possible to _elevate women_ while the demand for them for base
purposes is so great? We must go to the other e