Here is the testimony in relation to one important class, drawn from experience by our great English satirist: ‘And by the way, ye tender mothers and sober fathers of Christian families, a prodigious thing that theory of life is as orally learned at a great public school. Why, if you could hear those boys of fourteen, who blush before mothers and sneak off in silence in the presence of their daughters, talking among each other, it would be the woman’s turn to blush then. Before he was twelve years old, and while his mother fancied him an angel of candour, little Pen had heard talk enough to make him quite awfully wise upon certain points; and so, madam, has your pretty little rosy-cheeked son, who is coming home from school for the ensuing Christmas holidays. I don’t say that the boy is lost, so that the innocence has left him which he had from “Heaven which is our home,” but the shades of the prison-house are closing very fast over him, and that we are helping as much as possible to corrupt him.’ ‘Few boys,’ says the Headmaster of a large school, ‘ever remain a month in any school, public or private, without learning all the salient points in the physical relation of the sexes. There are two grave evils in this unlicensed instruction: first, the lessons are learned surreptitiously; second, the knowledge is gained from the vicious experiences of the corrupted older boys, and the traditions handed down by them.’ Temptations meet the lad at every step. From childhood onward, an unnatural forcing process is at work, and he is too often mentally corrupted, whilst physically unformed. This mental condition tends to hasten the functions of adult life into premature activity. As already stated, an important period exists between the establishment of puberty and confirmed virility. In the unperverted youth, this space of time, marked by the rush of new life, is invaluable as a period for storing up the new forces needed to confirm young manhood and fit it for the healthy exercise of its important social functions. The very indications of Nature’s abundant forces at the outset of life, are warnings that this new force must not be stimulated, that there is danger of excessive and hasty growth in one direction, danger of hindering that gradual development which alone insures strength. If at an early age, thought and feeling have been set in the right direction, and aids to virtue and to health surround the young man, then this period of time, before his twenty-fifth year, will lead him into a strong and vigorous manhood. But where the mind is corrupted, the imagination heated, and no strong love of virtue planted in the soul, the individual loses the power of self-control, and becomes the victim of physical sensation and suggestion. When this condition of mental and physical deterioration has been produced, it is no longer possible for him to resist surrounding temptations. There are dangers within and without, but he does not recognise the danger.