the power of the spirit
can overcome the lusts of the flesh. In spite of this educational
advance, courses of study in many public and private schools are still
prepared exactly as if educators had never known that at fifteen or
sixteen years of age, the will power being still weak, the bodily
desires are keen and insistent. The head master of Eton, Mr. Lyttleton,
who has given much thought to this gap in the education of youth says,
"The certain result of leaving an enormous majority of boys unguided and
uninstructed in a matter where their strongest passions are concerned,
is that they grow up to judge of all questions connected with it, from a
purely selfish point of view." He contends that this selfishness is due
to the fact that any single suggestion or hint which boys receive on the
subject comes from other boys or young men who are under the same potent
influences of ignorance, curiosity and the claims of self. No wholesome
counter-balance of knowledge is given, no attempt is made to invest the
subject with dignity or to place it in relation to the welfare of others
and to universal law. Mr. Lyttleton contends that this alone can explain
the peculiarly brutal attitude towards "outcast" women which is a
sustained cruelty to be discerned in no other relation of English life.
To quote him again: "But when the victims of man's cruelty are not birds
or beasts but our own countrywomen, doomed by the hundred thousand to a
life of unutterable shame and hopeless misery, then and then only the
general average tone of young men becomes hard and brutally callous or
frivolous with a kind of coarse frivolity not exhibited in relation to
any other form of human suffering." At the present moment thousands of
young people in our great cities possess no other knowledge of this
grave social evil which may at any moment become a dangerous personal
menace, save what is imparted to them in this brutal flippant spirit. It
has been said that the child growing up in the midst of civilization
receives from its parents and teachers something of the accumulated
experience of the world on all other subjects save upon that of sex. On
this one subject alone each generation learns little from its
predecessors.

An educator has lately pointed out that it is an old lure of vice to
pretend that it alone deals with manliness and reality, and he complains
that it is always difficult to convince youth that the higher planes of
life contain anything