ne moment to
deny the advantages of our great English public schools. They are
excellent for discipline and the formation of strong character,
especially for a ruling race like ours; and their very numerical
strength and importance command a splendid set of men as masters. But
both public and private boarding-schools labor under one great
disadvantage: they remove a boy from all family influence and violate
the order of our life, which can never be violated with impunity. Boys
and girls are sent into the world in pretty equal proportions, and we
were never intended to pile a lot of boys together without girls and
largely without any feminine influence whatever. To do so is to insure
moral disorder whether in our schools or yours. To quote from an
excellent paper of Dr. Butler's: "In giving us sisters," says one of the
Hares in _Guesses at Truth_, "God gave us the best moral antiseptic,"
and it is their absence more than anything else that has produced the
moral problems which our boarding-schools present. To be absent from
sisters for the greater part of the year, at an age when their
companionship is perhaps the most eloquent of silent appeals to purity,
is undoubtedly one of the greatest evils to be set against the blessings
of our public schools.[11]

For my own part, I can only say that the one thing which has filled me
at times with the darkness of despair has not been the facts about our
back streets, not those facts to meet which we hold conferences and
establish penitentiaries, refuges, preventive homes, etc.--I am full of
hopefulness about them--but the facts about our public, and still more
about our private, schools, which until lately have been met with dead
silence and masterly inactivity on the part of English parents. On the
part of mothers I feel sure it is ignorance, not indifference: if they
knew what I know, it simply could not be the latter. Even now, when
some, at least, of their ignorance has been dispelled, I doubt whether
they realize the depth of moral corruption which is to be found in our
public and private schools; the existence of heathen vices which by the
law of our land are treated as felony, and which we would fain hope,
after nineteen centuries of Christianity, might now be relegated to the
first chapter of Romans. They do not realize the presence of other and
commoner forms of impurity, the self-defilement which taints the moral
nature and stimulates the lower nature into unhealthy and