ected. It is too short a time for one to hope
that the evil has been eradicated; but when parents learn to fulfil
their moral duties of teaching and warning their own boys--as Dr. Dukes
observes--I feel sure it could be so far removed as to cause the numbers
to change places, so that we might obtain a percentage of ninety to
ninety-five of those who lead pure lives while at school, as against
five per cent, who are impure, reversing the lamentable ratio that now
exists. But here again there has been progress, and I feel sure that the
percentage of parents who do warn and teach their sons before sending
them to school is now incomparably higher than Dr. Dukes's "one per
cent." and is steadily rising.

As to other deeper and nameless evils, they have been already reduced to
a minimum, and if fathers could only be persuaded to do their duty by
their own boys, they might be made wholly to disappear.

I give you these facts about our English schools, that parents may see
for themselves what are the consequences of refusing both teaching and
warning to their boys, under the delusion that God's lilies will grow up
in the weedy garden of the human heart without strenuous culture and
training.

Do not, therefore, I beseech you, take for granted that your
boarding-schools are entirely free from such evils. You have the same
conditions that we have. Till lately your boys have been as untaught and
unwarned as ours. In your boarding-schools, as in ours, they are removed
from the purifying influence of mother and sisters. They are just at the
age which has neither the delicacy of childhood nor of early manhood.
Rest assured that conditions will breed like results.

"My belief, not lightly formed," says Dr. Butler,[13] "is, that
none of the great schools can congratulate themselves on anything
like safety from this danger. And if this is true of the great
public schools, it is still more true of private schools, where the
evil is admittedly greater. Boys and masters alike may strangely
deceive themselves; the evil may hide very close. Many a boy has
been known to assert positively and honestly that nothing of the
kind was ever heard of in his time, and that any fellow suspected
of it would have been cut, and half killed, when all the time the
evil was actively at work even among the circle of his intimate
friends."

And yet it is this evil, so pervasive in its influence, so c