These remarks apply more particularly to the young man, just becoming conscious of his newly-awakened emotions and physical powers. Should he be viewed and treated as a child, or allowed to go out from home to the dangers of the world? In acquiescing, as a general rule, in the latter course, I know that I shall shock the sensibilities and prejudices of many superficial observers. Yet Sydney Smith did not hesitate to avow a similar opinion. “Very few young men,” acknowledges the reverend gentleman, “have the power of negation in any great degree at first. Every young man must be exposed to temptation; he cannot learn the ways of men without being witness to their vices. If you attempt to preserve him from danger by keeping him out of the way of it, you render him quite unfit for any style of life in which he may be placed. The great point is, not to turn him out too soon, and to give him a pilot.” He must be _taught_ purity. There is no doubt that in very many children an improper tone of thought is established even before the period of puberty, unnatural as this must be allowed to be, and that oftentimes this sexual precocity is induced very directly by causes within our control. For a boy in our cities, or even our villages, to reach his teens without learning from his associates or by observation something of these matters, is simply impossible. It is for us to see to it that he does not receive the idea that they constitute the whole or the best part of life. “Remember,” says Herbert Spencer, “that the aim of your discipline should be to produce a self-governing being, not to produce a being to be governed by others. As your children are by and bye to be free men, with no one to control their daily conduct, you cannot too much accustom them to self-control while they are still under your eye. Aim, therefore, to diminish the parental government as fast as you can substitute for it in your child’s mind that self-government arising from a foresight of results. All transitions are dangerous, and the most dangerous is the transition from the restraint of the family circle to the non-restraint of the world. Hence the policy of cultivating a boy’s faculty of self-restraint by continually increasing the degree in which he is left to his self-restraint, and so bringing him, step by step, to a state of unaided self-restraint, obliterates the ordinary sudden and hazardous change from externally governed youth to internally governed maturity.”[9]