ome either straight
from home at ten or eleven, or from a school in which a few young boys
are educated with girls. Of boys who have come under my care as late
as twelve I have known but two who even professed total ignorance on
sexual subjects, and in one of these cases I am quite sure that no
such ignorance existed.

"In a large majority of cases solitary vice has been learned and
practised before a boy has got into his teens. The lack of insight
parents display in relation to these questions is quite phenomenal.
The few who mention the subject to me are always quite satisfied of
the complete 'innocence' of their boys. Some of the most precocious
and unclean boys I have known have been thus confidently commended to
me. Boys are wholly unsuspicious of the extent to which their inner
life lies open to the practised eye, and they feel secure that nothing
can betray their secrets if they themselves do not.

"In no department of our life are George Eliot's words truer than in
this department: 'Our daily familiar life is but a hiding of ourselves
from each other behind a screen of trivial words and deeds, and those
who sit with us at the same hearth are often the farthest off from the
deep human soul within us--full of unspoken evil and unacted good.' We
cannot prevent a boy's obtaining information on sexual questions. Our
choice lies between leaving him to pick it up from unclean and vulgar
minds, which will make it guilty and impure, and giving it ourselves
in such a way as to invest it from the first with a sacred character.

"Another idea which my experience proves to be an entire delusion is
the idea that a boy's natural refinement is a sufficient protection
against defilement. Some of the most refined boys I have had the
pleasure of caring for have been pronounced victims of solitary sin.
That it is a sin at all, that it has, indeed, any significance, either
ethical or spiritual, has not so much as occurred to most of them. On
what great moral question dare we leave the young to find their own
way absolutely without guidance? In this most difficult and dangerous
of all questions we leave the young soul, stirred by novel and blind
impulses, to grope in the darkness. Is it any wonder if it fails to
see things in their true relations?

"Again, it is sometimes thought that the consequences of secret sin
are so patent as to deter a boy from the sin itself. So far is this
from being the case that I have never yet found