eminence
in the educational world had already made equally sweeping, if less
definite, statements. Emboldened by this fact and by the commendations
above referred to, I venture to quote the greater part of this short
paper.

"The opinions I am about to put forward are based almost entirely on
my own twenty years' experience as a housemaster. My house contains
forty-eight boys, who vary in age from ten to nineteen and come from
comfortable middle-class homes.

"Private interviews with individual boys in my study have been the
chief vehicle of my teaching and the chief source of my information.
My objects in these interviews have been to warn boys against the
evils of private impurity, to supply them with a certain amount of
knowledge on sexual subjects in order to prevent a prurient curiosity,
and to induce them to confide to me the history of their own knowledge
and difficulties. In my early days I interviewed those only who
appeared to me to be obviously suffering from the effects of impurity,
and, of late years, the extreme pressure of my work has forced me very
reluctantly to recur to this plan.

"For several years, however, I was accustomed to interview every boy
under my care during his first term with me. Very rarely have I failed
in these interviews so to secure a boy's confidence as to learn the
salient facts of the history of his inner life. Sunday afternoon
addresses to the Sixth Form on the sexual dangers of late youth and
early manhood have resulted at times in elder boys themselves seeking
an interview with me. Such spontaneous confidences have naturally
been fuller, and therefore more instructive, than the confidences I
have invited.

"Many people are inclined to look upon the instruction of boys in
relation to adolescence as needless and harmful; needless because few
boys, they imagine, awake to the consciousness and problems of sex
until manhood; harmful because the pristine innocence of the mind is,
they think, destroyed, and evils are suggested of which a boy might
otherwise remain unconscious. To one who knows what boys really are
such ideas are nothing less than ludicrous.

"Boys come to our school from many different classes of preparatory
and secondary schools. Almost every such school seems to possess a few
boys who delight to initiate younger boys into sexual knowledge, and
usually into knowledge of solitary vice. The very few boys who have
come to me quite ignorant of these matters have c