Neither resort to _solitary_ vice. If this practice should not injure your system immediately, it will in the end. I am sorry to be obliged to advert to this subject; but I know there is occasion. Youth, especially those who lead a confined life, seek occasional excitement. Such sometimes resort to this lowest,--I may say most destructive of practices. Such is the constitution of things, as the Author of Nature has established it, that if every other vicious act were to escape its merited punishment in this world, the one in question could not. Whatever its votaries may think, it never fails, in a single instance, to injure them, personally; and consequently their posterity, should any succeed them. It is not indeed true that the foregoing vices do of themselves, produce all this mischief _directly_; but as Dr. Paley has well said, _criminal intercourse_ 'corrupts and _depraves the mind_ more than any single vice whatsoever.' It gradually benumbs the conscience, and leads on, step by step, to those blacker vices at which the youth would once have shuddered. But debasing as this vice is, it is scarcely more so than solitary gratification. The former is not always at hand; is attended, it may be, with expense; and with more or less danger of exposure. But the latter is practicable whenever temptation or rather imagination solicits, and appears to the morbid eye of sense, to be attended with no hazard. Alas! what a sad mistake is made here! It is a fact well established by medical men, that every error on this point is injurious; and that the constitution is often more surely or more effectually impaired by causes which do not appear to injure it in the least, than by occasional and heavier shocks, which rouse it to a reaction. The one case may be compared to daily _tippling_, the other to those _periodical_ drunken frolics, which, having an interval of weeks or months between them, give the system time to recover, in part, (but _in part only_) from the violence it had sustained. I wish to put the younger portion of my readers upon their guard against a set of wretches who take pains to initiate youth, while yet almost children, into the practice of the vice to which I have here adverted. Domestics--where the young are too familiar with them--_have_ been known to be thus ungrateful to their employers. There are, however, people of several classes, who do not hesitate to mislead, in this manner. But the misfortune is, that this book will not be apt to fall into the hands of those to whom _these_ remarks apply, till the ruinous habit is already formed. And then it is that counsel sometimes comes too late. Should these pages meet the eye of any who have been misled, let them remember that they have begun a career which multitudes repent bitterly; and from which few are apt to return. But there have been instances of reform; therefore none ought to despair. 'What man has done, man may do.'