CHAPTER I.
PREVALENCE OF IMPURITY AMONG BOYS: THE AUTHOR'S OWN EXPERIENCE.
Of the perils which beset the growing boy all are recognised, and, in a
measure, guarded against except the most inevitable and most fatal peril of all.
In all that concerns the use and abuse of the reproductive organs the great
majority of boys have hitherto been left without adult guidance, and have
imbibed their ideas from the coarser of their companions and from casual
references to the subject in the Bible and other books. Under these conditions
very few boys escape two of the worst dangers into which it is possible for a
lad to fall—the artificial stimulation of the reproductive organs and the
acquisition of degraded ideas on the subject of sex. That many lives are thus
prematurely shortened, that many constitutions are permanently enfeebled, that
very many lads who might otherwise have striven successfully against the sexual
temptations of adult life succumb—almost without a struggle—to them, can be
doubted by no one who is familiar with the inner life of boys and men.
Of these two evils, self-abuse, though productive of manifold and disastrous results, is distinctly the less. Many
boys outgrow the physical injuries which, in ignorance, they inflict upon
themselves in youth; but very few are able wholly to cleanse themselves from the
foul desires associated in their minds with sex. These desires make young men
impotent in the face of temptation. Under their evil dominance, even men of kind
disposition will, by seduction, inflict on an innocent girl agony, misery,
degradation, and premature death. They will indulge In the most degrading of all
vices with prostitutes on the street. They will defile the atmosphere of social
life with filthy talk and ribald jest. Even a clean and ennobling passion can do
little to redeem them. The pure stream of human love is made turbid with lust.
After a temporary uplifting in marriage the soul is again dragged down, marriage
vows are broken and the blessings of home life are turned into wormwood and
gall.
That a system so destructive of physical and of spiritual health should have
lasted almost intact until now will, I believe, shortly become a matter for
general amazement; for while evidence of the widespread character of youthful
perversion is a product of quite recent years, the assumptions on which this
system has been based are unreasonable and incapable of proof.
Since conclusive evidence of the prevalence of impurity among boys is
available, I will not at present invite the reader to examine the assumptions
which lead most people to a contrary belief. When I do so, I
shall hope to demonstrate that we might reasonably expect to find things
precisely as they are. In the first and second chapters we shall see to what
conclusions teachers who have actual experience in the matter have been led.
There are several teachers whose authority in most matters stands so very
much above my own that it might seem presumptuous to begin by laying my own
experiences before the reader; but I venture to take this course because no
other teacher, as far as I know, has published quite such definite evidence as I
have done; and I think that the more general statements of such eminent men as
Canon Lyttelton, Mr. A.C. Benson, and Dr. Clement Dukes will appeal to the
reader more powerfully when he has some idea of the manner in which conclusions
on this subject may be reached. I have some reason, also, for the belief that
the paper I read in 1908 at the London University before the International
Congress on Moral Education has been considered of great significance by very
competent judges. By a special decision of the Executive of the Congress
it—alone of all sectional papers—was printed in extenso in the official
report. Later on, it came under the notice of Sir R. Baden-Powell, at whose
request it was republished in the Headquarters Gazette—the official organ
of the Boy Scout movement.
It certainly did require some courage at the time to put my results before
the public, for I was not then aware that men of great eminence in the
educational world had already made equally sweeping, if less
definite, statements. Emboldened by this fact and by the commendations above
referred to, I venture to quote the greater part of this short paper.
"The opinions I am about to put forward are based almost entirely on my own
twenty years' experience as a housemaster. My house contains forty-eight boys,
who vary in age from ten to nineteen and come from comfortable middle-class
homes.
"Private interviews with individual boys in my study have been the chief
vehicle of my teaching and the chief source of my information. My objects in
these interviews have been to warn boys against the evils of private impurity,
to supply them with a certain amount of knowledge on sexual subjects in order to
prevent a prurient curiosity, and to induce them to confide to me the history of
their own knowledge and difficulties. In my early days I interviewed those only
who appeared to me to be obviously suffering from the effects of impurity, and,
of late years, the extreme pressure of my work has forced me very reluctantly to
recur to this plan.
"For several years, however, I was accustomed to interview every boy under my
care during his first term with me. Very rarely have I failed in these
interviews so to secure a boy's confidence as to learn the salient facts of the
history of his inner life. Sunday afternoon addresses to the Sixth Form on the
sexual dangers of late youth and early manhood have resulted at times in elder
boys themselves seeking an interview with me. Such spontaneous confidences have naturally been fuller, and therefore more
instructive, than the confidences I have invited.
"Many people are inclined to look upon the instruction of boys in relation to
adolescence as needless and harmful; needless because few boys, they imagine,
awake to the consciousness and problems of sex until manhood; harmful because
the pristine innocence of the mind is, they think, destroyed, and evils are
suggested of which a boy might otherwise remain unconscious. To one who knows
what boys really are such ideas are nothing less than ludicrous.
"Boys come to our school from many different classes of preparatory and
secondary schools. Almost every such school seems to possess a few boys who
delight to initiate younger boys into sexual knowledge, and usually into
knowledge of solitary vice. The very few boys who have come to me quite ignorant
of these matters have come either straight from home at ten or eleven, or from a
school in which a few young boys are educated with girls. Of boys who have come
under my care as late as twelve I have known but two who even professed total
ignorance on sexual subjects, and in one of these cases I am quite sure that no
such ignorance existed.
"In a large majority of cases solitary vice has been learned and practised
before a boy has got into his teens. The lack of insight parents display in
relation to these questions is quite phenomenal. The few who
mention the subject to me are always quite satisfied of the complete 'innocence'
of their boys. Some of the most precocious and unclean boys I have known have
been thus confidently commended to me. Boys are wholly unsuspicious of the
extent to which their inner life lies open to the practised eye, and they feel
secure that nothing can betray their secrets if they themselves do not.
"In no department of our life are George Eliot's words truer than in this
department: 'Our daily familiar life is but a hiding of ourselves from each
other behind a screen of trivial words and deeds, and those who sit with us at
the same hearth are often the farthest off from the deep human soul within
us—full of unspoken evil and unacted good.' We cannot prevent a boy's obtaining
information on sexual questions. Our choice lies between leaving him to pick it
up from unclean and vulgar minds, which will make it guilty and impure, and
giving it ourselves in such a way as to invest it from the first with a sacred
character.
"Another idea which my experience proves to be an entire delusion is the idea
that a boy's natural refinement is a sufficient protection against defilement.
Some of the most refined boys I have had the pleasure of caring for have been
pronounced victims of solitary sin. That it is a sin at all, that it has,
indeed, any significance, either ethical or spiritual, has not so much as
occurred to most of them. On what great moral question dare we leave the young
to find their own way absolutely without guidance? In this
most difficult and dangerous of all questions we leave the young soul, stirred
by novel and blind impulses, to grope in the darkness. Is it any wonder if it
fails to see things in their true relations?
"Again, it is sometimes thought that the consequences of secret sin are so
patent as to deter a boy from the sin itself. So far is this from being the case
that I have never yet found a single boy (even among those who have, through it,
made almost complete wrecks physically and mentally) who has of himself
connected these consequences with the sin itself. I have, on the other hand,
known many sad cases in which, through the weakening of will power, which this
habit causes, boys of high ideals have fallen again and again after their eyes
have been fully opened. This sin is rarely a conscious moral transgression. The
boy is a victim to be sympathised with and helped, not an offender to be
reproved and punished."
I desire to call the attention of the reader to two points in the foregoing
extract. I was particular in giving my credentials to state the character and
limitations of my experience. Everywhere in life one finds confident and
sweeping generalisations made by men who have little or no experience to appeal
to. This is specially the case in the educational world, and perhaps most of all
in discussions on this very subject. Some men, at least, are willing to instruct
the public with nothing better to guide them than the light of Nature. It would
greatly assist the quest of truth if everyone who ventures to address the public on this question would first present his
credentials.
There is danger lest the reader should discount the significance of the
statements I make in the foregoing paper by falling into the error of supposing
that the facts stated apply, after all, to one school only. This is not by any
means so. The facts have been collected at one school; but those which
refer to the prevalence of sex knowledge and of masturbation have reference
solely to the condition of boys when they first entered, and are significant of
the conditions which obtain at some scores of schools and in many homes. I
venture here to quote and to warmly endorse Canon Lyttelton's opinion: "It is,
however, so easy to be misunderstood in this matter that I must insert a caution
against an inference which may be drawn from these words, viz. that school life
is the origin of immorality among boys. The real origin is to be found in
the common predisposition to vicious conceptions, which is the result of
neglect. Nature provides in almost every case an active curiosity on this
subject; and that curiosity must be somehow allayed; and if it were not allayed
at school, false and depraved ideas would be picked up at home.... So readily
does an ignorant mind at an early age take in teaching about these subjects that
there are no conceivable conditions of modern social life not fraught with grave
peril to a young boy, if once he has been allowed to face them quite unprepared,
either by instruction or by warning. And this manifestly applies to life at
home, or in a day-school, or in a boarding-school to an
almost equal degree."[A]
[A] Training of the Young in Relation to Sex, p. 1 et
seq.
One of the facts which I always tried to elicit from boys was the source of
their information, or rather the character of that source, for I was naturally
anxious not to ask a boy to incriminate any individual known to me. In many
cases, information came first to the boy at home from a brother, or
cousin, or casual acquaintance, or domestic servant. In one of the worst cases I
have known the information was given to a boy by another boy—an entire stranger
to him—whom he happened to meet on a country road when cycling. Since boys meet
one another very much more at school than elsewhere and spend three-fourths of
their lives there, of course information is more often obtained at school than
at home. My own experience leads me to think that in this respect the
day-school—probably on account of its mixed social conditions—is worse than the
boarding-school.
Before passing from matters of personal experience, it may interest the
reader if I give particulars of a few typical cases to illustrate some points on
which I have insisted.
Case A.—The father and mother of a boy close on thirteen came to see
me before entering the lad. They had no idea that I was specially interested in
purity-teaching; but they were anxious to ascertain what precautions we took
against the corruption of small boys. They struck me as very good parents. I was specially pleased that they were alive to the dangers of
impurity, and that the mother could advert openly to the matter without
embarrassment. I advised them to give the boy explicit warning; but they said
that they were anxious to preserve his innocence as long as possible. He was at
present absolutely simple, and they hoped that he would long remain so. It was a
comfort to them that I was interested in the subject, and they would leave the
boy with confidence in my care. As soon as I saw the boy, I found it difficult
to believe in his innocence; and I soon discovered that he was thoroughly
corrupt. Not merely did he begin almost at once to corrupt other boys, but he
actually gave them his views on brothels! In a private interview with me he
admitted all this, and told me that he was corrupted at ten years of age, when
he was sent, after convalescence from scarlet fever, to a country village for
three months. There he seems to have associated with a group of street boys, who
gave him such information as they had, and initiated him into self-abuse. Since
then he had been greedily seeking further information and passing it on.
Case B.—A delicate, gentle boy of eleven, an only son, was sent to me
by an intellectual father, who had been his constant companion. The lad was very
amiable and well-intentioned. A year later he gave me particulars of his
corruption by a cousin, who was three years older than he. Since that
time—particularly of late—he had practised masturbation. He had not the least
idea that it was hurtful or even unrefined, and thought that
it was peculiar to himself and his cousin. He knew from his cousin the chief
facts of maternity and paternity, but had not spoken to other boys about them.
He was intensely anxious to cleanse himself entirely, and promised to let me
know of any lapse, should it occur. In the following vacation he developed
pneumonia. For some days his life hung in the balance, and then flickered out.
His father wrote me a letter of noble resignation. Terribly as he felt his loss,
he was greatly consoled, he said, by the knowledge that his boy had died while
his mind was innocent and before he could know even what temptation was. It is
needless to add that I never hinted the real facts to the father; and—without
altering any material detail—I am disguising the case lest it should possibly be
recognised by him. I have often wondered whether, when the lad's life hung in
the balance, it might not have been saved if Death's scale had not been weighted
by the child's lowered vitality.
Case C.—A boy of fourteen came to me. He was a miserable specimen in
every way—pale, lethargic, stupid almost beyond belief. He had no mother; and
the father, though a man of leisure, evidently found it difficult to make the
lad much of a companion. I felt certain from the first that the boy was an
exceptionally bad victim of self-abuse; And this I told his father, advising him
to investigate the matter. He was horrified at my diagnosis, and committed the
great indiscretion of taxing the boy with self-abuse as though it were a
conscious and grave fault. The father wrote during the
vacation saying that he found I was entirely mistaken: not, content with the
lad's assurance, he had watched him with the utmost care. As soon as the boy
returned to school I interviewed him. He admitted readily that he had long
masturbated himself daily—sometimes oftener. He had first—as far as he could
remember, at about six—had his private parts excited by his nurse, who
apparently did this to put an irritable child into a good temper! My warning had
little effect upon him, as he had become a hopeless victim. He was too delicate
a boy for us to desire to keep; and after a brief stay at school, during which
we nursed him through a critical illness, he left to finish his education under
private tuition at home.
Case D.—This boy came to me at thirteen. He was always a conscientious
and amiable boy, but was nervous and dull. By fifteen his dullness had
increased, and he complained of brain-strain and poorness of memory. Finally he
began to develop St. Vitus's dance. I sent him to our school doctor, who
returned him with a note saying that his condition was serious—that he must stop
all work, &c. &c. I was in my study when the lad came back, and I at
once told him what was the matter. He frankly admitted frequent self-abuse,
which he had learned from an elder brother. He had not the least suspicion that
the habit was injurious; but was very apprehensive about his future until I
reassured him. He wanted me to write at once and warn a younger brother who had fallen into the habit. By great effort he got
himself rapidly under control. His nervous twitchings disappeared, his vitality
improved, the brain-fag gradually ceased; and when he left, eighteen months
later, he was fairly normal. His improvement continued afterwards, and he is now
a successful man of business and a married man.
Case E.—This boy entered at twelve. He was very weak physically and
highly nervous—owing, his people thought, to severe bullying at a previous
school. He was an able boy, of literary and artistic tastes, and almost
painfully conscientious. He was very shy; always thought that he was despised by
other boys; and was a duffer at games, which he avoided to the utmost. With my
present experience I should have known him to be a victim of self-abuse. Then, I
did not suspect him; and it was not until he was leaving at eighteen for the
University that we talked the matter over, on his initiative. Then I found that
he had been bullied into impurity at eleven, and was now a helpless victim.
After two years at the University he wrote me that, though the temptation now
came less frequently, he seemed absolutely powerless when it did come; that he
despised himself so much that the impulse to suicide often haunted him; but that
the cowardice which had kept him from games at school would probably prevent his
taking his life. With the assistance of an intense and devoted religious life he
gradually began to gain self-mastery. It is some years now since he has
mentioned the subject to me.
These are merely specimen cases. Cases A, B, and C
illustrate my assertions that parents are wonderfully blind; Cases B and E, that
quite exceptional refinement in a boy gives no protection from temptation to
impurity; Case D, that a boy, even in an extreme case, does not know that the
habit is injurious. In respect of their severity, C, D, and E are not normal but
extreme cases. The reader must not imagine that boys ordinarily suffer as much
as these did.