intellectually. At the present moment my body is as lithe, as powerful
and as enduring as the body of a youth of twenty, and I attribute this
wealth of health to the fact that twenty-five years ago, I tackled
this problem of self-mastery and laid the foundations for my present
strength.

Who will give the world a novel or a book dealing with this terrific
problem? Who will tell millions of young men around the age of twenty
that they cannot burn their candle at both ends? With the ordinary man
in civil life the temptation is a negligible quantity compared to the
life of a soldier or sailor. In the army and navy it is talked
incessantly so that a man has a double battle to fight. He fights the
thing and he fights a multitude of suggestions that come to him every
day of his life.

The most revolting, disgusting and degrading thing I ever heard talked
about on a man o' war was the perversion of the sex instinct--the
unnatural use of it! This, too, is a joke and laughed at and talked
lightly about; but the records of the British Navy, and I think of
other navies, would reveal something along this line that would shock
civilization. I did not believe this possible, but the first six
months on board changed my mind.

To the great credit of the British Navy, be it said that this crime is
held almost equal to murder, and when an officer is convicted of it,
the trial is _in camera_, and the findings kept secret; but no matter
how high his rank, he is stripped of his standing and marched over the
side of the ship as a degraded criminal and an outcast. A man of the
ranks convicted of it usually spends the rest of his natural life in
prison.