self to some eminent teachers. As soon
as a boy is about to enter the school a letter is sent to his parents
advising them to give the boy instruction, and a pamphlet is enclosed
for this purpose. This plan has the decided advantage of shifting the
responsibility on to the shoulders of those who ought to take it. The
weakness of the plan arises from the fact that most parents do not
believe in the prevalence of impurity among boys, and are quite
confident that their own boys need no warning. Hence they may do
nothing at all, or merely content themselves with some vague and quite
useless statement.

The traditions of most boys' schools make it impossible for those
intimate and respectful relations to exist between masters and boys
without which confidential teaching of this kind may be even worse
than useless. Where masters are invariably referred to disrespectfully
if not contemptuously, where a teacher's most earnest address is a
"jaw" which the recipient is expected to betray and mock at with his
companions; where to shield profanity, indecency, and bullying from
detection is the imperative duty of every boy below the Sixth; where
failure to avert from a moral leper the kindly treatment which might
restore him to health and prevent the wholesale infection of others is
the one unpardonable sin, only one or two teachers of a generation can
hope to do much, and the risk of failure is immense. I can hardly
believe that the present race of teachers will long tolerate the
system I here advert to. Public opinion _can_ be organised and
enlisted as strongly on the side of Right as it is now, but too often,
on the side of Evil. Mr. A.C. Benson is very moderate when he writes:
"To take no steps to arrive at such an organisation, and to leave it
severely alone, is a very dark responsibility."

Even in such a school, some good is, I know, done by tactful public
references to the existence of masturbation and to its deplorable
consequences.

The question is not free from difficulty even when the general
atmosphere of the school is healthy and helpful. If one dared to leave
this instruction until the age of puberty, the lad would be capable of
a much deeper impression than he is at an earlier age, and the
impression would be fresh just at the time at which it is most needed.
In the case of boys who have come to me at nine or ten I have
sometimes ventured to defer my interview for four or five years, and
have found them quite unc