It is probable that only a small proportion of homosexual boys in schools can properly be described as "vicious." A. Hoche, describing homosexuality in German schools ("Zür Frage der forensischen Beurteilung sexuellen Vergehen," _Neurologisches Centralblatt_, 1896, No. 2), and putting together communications received from various medical men regarding their own youthful experiences at school, finds relationships of the kind very common, usually between boys of different ages and school-classes. According to one observer, the feminine, or passive, part was always played by a boy of girlish form and complexion, and the relationships were somewhat like those of normal lovers, with kissing, poems, love-letters, scenes of jealousy, sometimes visits to each other in bed, but without masturbation, pederasty, or other grossly physical manifestations. From his own youthful experience Hoche records precisely similar observations, and remarks that the lovers were by no means recruited from the vicious elements in the school. (The elder scholars, of 21 or 22 years of age, formed regular sexual relationships with the servant-girls in the house.) It is probable that the homosexual relationships in English schools are, as a rule, not more vicious than those described by Hoche, but that the concealment in which they are wrapped leads to exaggeration. In the course of a discussion on this matter over thirty years ago, "Olim Etoniensis" wrote (_Journal of Education_, 1882, p. 85) that, on making a list of the vicious boys he had known at Eton, he found that "these very boys had become cabinet ministers, statesmen, officers, clergymen, country-gentlemen, etc., and that they are nearly all of them fathers of thriving families, respected and prosperous." But, as Marro has remarked, the question is not thus settled. Public distinction by no means necessarily implies any fine degree of private morality.