PREVALENCE OF IMPURITY AMONG BOYS: THE OPINIONS OF CANON LYTTELTON,
DR. DUKES, AND OTHERS.
I propose now to make clear to the reader the fact that the
conclusions I have reached as to the existence of sexual knowledge
among boys, and as to the prevalence of self-abuse, are entirely borne
out by the opinion of the most distinguished teachers and medical men.
Canon Lyttelton writes with an authority which no one will question.
Educated at Eton, he was for two years an assistant master at
Wellington College; then, for fifteen years, headmaster of Haileybury
College, and has now been headmaster of Eton for over six years. He
has intimate knowledge of boys, derived, as regards the question of
purity, from confidential talks with them. The quotations which follow
are from his work _Training of the Young in Laws of Sex_. Canon
Lyttelton does not think it needful to make statements as to the
prevalence of impurity among boys. He rather assumes that this
prevalence is obvious and, under present conditions, inevitable. I
have already quoted one passage which involves this assumption, and
now invite the reader to consider two others. "In the school life of
boys, in spite of very great improvements, it is _impossible_ that
sexual subjects should be wholly avoided in common talk.... Though, in
preparatory schools of little boys under fourteen, the increasing
vigilance of masters, and constant supervision, combined with constant
employment, reduce the evil of prurient talk to a minimum, yet these
subjects _will_ crop up.... It should be remembered that the boys who
are talkative about such subjects are just those whose ideas are most
distorted and vicious. In the public school, owing not only to freer
talk and more mixed company but to the boy's own wider range of
vision, sexual questions, and also those connected with the structure
of the body, come to the fore and begin to occupy more or less of the
thoughts of all but a peculiarly constituted minority of the whole
number.
"Men, as I have shown, have been severely dealt with by Nature in this
respect: she has forced them, at a time of life when their minds are
ill compacted, their ideas chaotic, and their wills untrained, to face
an ordeal which demands above all things reverence based on knowledge
and resolution sustained by high affections. An _enormously large
proportion_ flounder blindly into the mire before they know what it
is, not necessarily, but very often into the defilement of evil habit,
but, still more often, into the tainted air of diseased opinion, and
after a few years _some of them_ emerge saved, but so as by fire."[B]
[Footnote B: Pages 4 _et seq._: the italics are mine.]
The following are quotations from the _Upton Letters_, written by Mr.
A.C. Benson. Mr. Benson is one of the most distinguished of modern
teachers: he has had long experience of public-school life both as a
boy and as a master: he has that insight into the heart of boyhood
which can come only to one who has affectionate sympathy with boys and
has been the recipient of their confidences. It will be abundantly
evident from the passages which follow that in Mr. Benson's opinion no
boy is likely to preserve his "innocence" in passing through a public
school.
"The subject is so unpleasant that many masters dare not speak of it
at all, and excuse themselves by saying that they don't want to put
ideas into boys' heads. I cannot conscientiously believe that a man
who has been through a big public school himself can honestly be
afraid of that." "The standard of purity is low: a vicious boy does
not find his vicious tendencies by any means a bar to social success."
This, of course, assumes that the vicious tendencies are a matter of
notoriety. A similar implication is involved in the following: "I do
not mean to say that there are not many boys who are both pure-minded
and honest; but they treat such virtues as a secret preference of
their own, and do not consider that it is in the least necessary to
interfere with the practice of others or even to disapprove of it." He
further gives it as his opinion that "The deadly and insidious
temptation of impurity has, as far as one can learn, increased," and
tells us "An innocent-minded boy whose natural inclination to purity
gave way before perpetual temptation and even compulsion might be
thought to have erred, but would have scanty, if any, expression of
either sympathy or pity from other boys; while if he breathed the
least hint of his miserable position to a master and the fact came
out, he would be universally scouted.... One hears of simply
heart-rending cases where a boy dare not even tell his parents of what
he endures." It would thus appear that in some of the premier schools
of the world impurity is a matter of notoriety, sometimes of
compulsion; and that, to a boy's own strong inclination to
concealment, is superadded, by the public opinion of the school, an
imperious command that this concealment shall, even in heart-rending
cases, be maintained.
No one, I think, will maintain that private schools _as a class_ are
in the least degree lees corrupt than public schools; while there are,
I am sure, at least a few schools in which public opinion condemns
_open_ impurity, and will not tolerate impure talk. And while I am
confident that it is possible, not merely to attain this condition in
a school, but also to reduce private impurity to a negligible
quantity, impurity--in one form or another--is, in general, so widely
spread in boys' schools of every type, that it is difficult to
understand how anyone familiar with school life can doubt its
prevalence.
Let us now consider the opinion of Dr. Clement Dukes, the medical
officer of Rugby School and the greatest English authority on school
hygiene. In the preface to the fourth edition of his well-known work
_Health at School_, Dr. Dukes writes: "I have studied children in all
their phases and stages for many years--two years at the Hospital for
Sick Children in 61 Ormond Street, London, followed by thirty-three
years at Rugby School--a professional history which has provided me
with an almost unique experience in all that relates to the Health and
Disease of Childhood and Youth, and has compelled constant and steady
thought upon every aspect of this problem." In an earlier work, _The
Preservation of Health_, Dr. Dukes gives his estimate of the
prevalence of masturbation, and quotes the opinion of other
authorities whose credentials he has verified; In this work, on page
150, he writes of masturbation: "I believe that the reason why it is
so widespread an evil--amounting, I gather, although from the nature
of the case no complete evidence can ever be accurately obtained, to
somewhere _about 90 to 95 per cent. of all boys at boarding-schools_--is
because the boy leaves his home in the first instance without one word
of warning from his parents ... and thus falls into evil ways from his
innocence and ignorance alone.... This immorality is estimated by some
at 80 per cent., by others at 90 per cent. Another says that not 10
per cent. are innocent. Another that it has always begun at from eight
to twelve years of age. Others that it is always worst amongst the
elder boys. Others that 'it is universal.'" Professor Stanley Hall,
in his great work on _Adolescence_, after a similar and exhaustive
review of the numerous works on this subject in different languages,
concludes: "The whole literature on the subject attests that whenever
careful researches have been undertaken the results are appalling as
to prevalence." And yet there are people who deprecate purity-teaching
for boys because they feel that a boy's natural modesty is quite a
sufficient protection, and that there is danger of destroying a boy's
innocence by putting ideas into his head! To hear such people talk,
and to listen to the way in which they speak of self-abuse as though
it implied monstrous moral perversion, one would think that the
condition of morals when they were young was wholly different. The
great novelist Thackeray gives little countenance to this opinion when
he writes in _Pendennis_: "And, by the way, ye tender mothers and
sober fathers of Christian families, a prodigious thing that theory of
life is as orally learned at a great public school. Why if you could
hear those boys of fourteen who blush before mothers and sneak off in
silence in the presence of their daughters, talking among each
other--it would be the woman's turn to blush then. Before he was
twelve years old little Pen had heard talk enough to make him quite
awfully wise upon certain points--and so, madam, has your pretty
rosy-cheeked son, who is coming home from school for the ensuing
holidays. I don't say that the boy is lost, or that the innocence has
left him which he had from 'Heaven, which is our home,' but that the
shades of the prison-house are closing fast over him, and that we are
helping as much as possible to corrupt him."
Before concluding this chapter I would caution the reader against the
error of supposing that the opinions expressed by Canon Lyttelton and
Dr. Dukes are indicative merely of the conditions they have met at
Haileybury, Eton, and Rugby. They are equally significant of the
conditions which obtain in the innumerable schools from which
Haileybury, Eton, and Rugby are recruited; and as there is no reason
why other preparatory schools should differ from these, they are
significant of the almost universal condition of boys' schools.