In this stage of development, the moral consciousness of the _genus_ is at low ebb. The accentuation of Male-traits now occurring occasions a recrudescence of primal instincts. And the collective atmosphere such recrudescence engenders in a boy-community, marooned in school-life apart from the refining, softening influences of home and womenkind, is only too often an evil and a demoralising one. Boarding-schools should be abolished; good day-schools substituted. More than at any other phase of his existence, the masculine needs now the Woman-influences from _without_; because the Woman-traits _within_ are, for a period, submerged beneath a surge of Maleness. Notwithstanding these obvious truths, however, during the years when body and mind should be adapting gradually, consciously and subconsciously, to the social environment wherein their lives are to be passed; when the mental horizon should be expanding simultaneously with the expanding intelligence, when the moral should be rising to the new demands upon it, boys are imprisoned in scholastic institutions, where they are hemmed in by routine and restrictions, in an atmosphere of puerile conceptions, puerile traditions, puerile conventions and associations; their chief outlet and respite the narrow rules and the narrowing absorptions of so-called "Games," supervised by martinet Games-masters. And then, when we bring them to the field of life, we are surprised to find many of them unintelligent, unadapted, unadaptable; resourceless, inept and incompetent. Cooped during those impressionable years in a wholly artificial environment, when confronted by the world of living actualities, which is not ruled by similar narrow restrictions, nor shaped upon the artificial forms and puerile misconceptions in which their young ductile natures have been run and have set--they show themselves wholly unfitted for life, with its varied, difficult and complex conditions and adjustments. They have become, in point of fact, mentally and temperamentally "provincial." The good form which some of them acquire is derived less from school-ethics or training than from an aristocratic strain of boys with whom they have been associated. And being acquired, when it is not the form of their own social order, it appears only too frequently as a counterfeit; engendering insincerity and snobbishness, and marring individuality.