Now the important point seems to me to be this: the sexual impulse is a force on the proper direction of which depends, to a large extent, the happiness of a man's life; and marriage is the course into which it should be directed. No one, I think, will deny that. We may talk of the liberation of the sexes, of greater facilities for divorce, of the right of each man and woman to repair a mistake caused by the first surprise of a newly-awakened instinct; but there can be no questioning the assertion that monogamy is the ideal, and that while nothing can be more wretched than an ill-harmonised relationship, in the lifelong devotion of man and woman is to be found the surest happiness. That is the standard by which public school morality should be judged. But it is not the standard by which it is officially, and indeed generally, judged. A Public School is only a phase, a prelude in the sexual development of a man. Head masters are inclined to mistake it for the completed rhythm. In the same way that the head master of a Preparatory School specially coaches a boy for a scholarship, not realising that what for him is the whole race is for the boy but a first lap, so the head master of a Public School regards the preservation of innocence between the years of 13 and 19 as the entire battle. As far as I can make out this attitude is adopted by nearly every unscientific writer on the subject. If the matter ended there it would, of course, be simple. Rigid policemanship and supervision and a system of spies would probably be effective. They might stamp out impurity to a large extent; they would also destroy the discipline of independence, of trust and of authority that one learns at a Public School. The matter is far less simple. The public school system is unnatural. Through unnatural channels, therefore, a natural impulse has to flow into a natural course. Let us see, more or less, what happens. We have assumed that an ignorant and innocent boy arrives at his Public School at the age of thirteen, and, to simplify the matter further, we will assume that the boy is not particularly good-looking, and is not, therefore, likely to win the patronage of his seniors. For the first weeks everything is so strange that he lives in a world of his own fashioning. Later on, as he begins to enter the life of the school, he is puzzled by references to an offence the nature of which he does not understand. He hears some one described as being 'smutty.' He does not in any way connect this with the elaborate address that was delivered to him on the last day at his prep. Indeed I knew of a new boy who informed his parents on a postcard that a rather decent chap in his house had been nearly sacked for 'smut.' 'Is this,' he asked, 'anything serious?' He received in reply a reassuring letter telling him that he need not worry about such things just yet.