back streets, not those facts to meet which we hold conferences and
establish penitentiaries, refuges, preventive homes, etc.--I am full of
hopefulness about them--but the facts about our public, and still more
about our private, schools, which until lately have been met with dead
silence and masterly inactivity on the part of English parents. On the
part of mothers I feel sure it is ignorance, not indifference: if they
knew what I know, it simply could not be the latter. Even now, when
some, at least, of their ignorance has been dispelled, I doubt whether
they realize the depth of moral corruption which is to be found in our
public and private schools; the existence of heathen vices which by the
law of our land are treated as felony, and which we would fain hope,
after nineteen centuries of Christianity, might now be relegated to the
first chapter of Romans. They do not realize the presence of other and
commoner forms of impurity, the self-defilement which taints the moral
nature and stimulates the lower nature into unhealthy and abnormal
activity. They do not understand the essentially sporadic nature of the
evil--that it may exist "as a pestilence that walketh in darkness" in
one boarding-school, while another, owing to the influence of a good set
of boys, is comparatively free from it; and they will, therefore, take a
single denial of its existence, possibly from their own husbands, as
conclusive. Even the affirmations of head-masters are not altogether to
be trusted here, as mothers cannot betray the confidence of their own
boys, and often fail in gaining their consent to let the head-master
know what is going on, in the boy's natural dread of being found out as
the source of the information and, according to the ruling code, cut, as
having "peached." Once I obtained leave to expose an indescribable state
of things which was going on in broad daylight in an unsupervised room
at one of our great public schools, utterly unsuspected by the
head-master, and his subordinate, the house-master. But another case
which for long made my life a kind of waking nightmare remained