there is no marked change in this
respect at puberty. The antagonism to authority so often observed
after puberty is the product of unsatisfactory external influences.
With puberty the desire to stand well with others, and in particular
the desire to seem manly, increases. If a debased public opinion
demands of a boy the cheap manliness of profanity, tobacco, and
irreverence, the demand creates a plentiful supply, while it also
suppresses as priggish or "pi" any avowed or suspected devotion to
higher ideals. A healthy public opinion, working in harmony with a
boy's nobler instincts, calls forth in him an earnest devotion to high
ideals, and causes him to exercise, on the development of his powers
and in a crusade against wrong, the new energies which a wholesome
puberty places at his disposal.

CHAPTER I.

PREVALENCE OF IMPURITY AMONG BOYS: THE AUTHOR'S OWN EXPERIENCE.

Of the perils which beset the growing boy all are recognised, and, in
a measure, guarded against except the most inevitable and most fatal
peril of all. In all that concerns the use and abuse of the
reproductive organs the great majority of boys have hitherto been left
without adult guidance, and have imbibed their ideas from the coarser
of their companions and from casual references to the subject in the
Bible and other books. Under these conditions very few boys escape two
of the worst dangers into which it is possible for a lad to fall--the
artificial stimulation of the reproductive organs and the acquisition
of degraded ideas on the subject of sex. That many lives are thus
prematurely shortened, that many constitutions are permanently
enfeebled, that very many lads who might otherwise have striven
successfully against the sexual temptations of adult life
succumb--almost without a struggle--to them, can be doubted by no one
who is familiar with the inner life of boys and men.

Of these two evils, self-abuse, though productive of manifold and
disastrous results, is distinctly the less. Many boys outgrow the
physical injuries which, in ignorance, they inflict upon themselves in
youth; but very few are able wholly to cleanse themselves from the
foul desires associated in their minds with sex. These desires make
young men impotent in the face of temptation. Under their evil
dominance, even men of kind disposition will, by seduction, inflict on
an innocent girl agony, misery, degradation, and premature death. They
will indulge In the most degr