In all the wide range of accepted British maxims there is none, take
it for all in all, more thoroughly abominable than the one as to the
sowing of wild oats. Look at it on what side you will, and you can make
nothing but a devil’s maxim of it. What a man—be he young, old, or
middle-aged—sows, _that_, and nothing else shall he reap. The one only
thing to do with wild oats is to put them carefully into the hottest
part of the fire, and get them burnt to dust, every seed of them. If
you sow them, no matter in what ground, up they will come, with long,
tough roots like couch-grass, and luxuriant stalks and leaves as sure
as there is a sun in heaven—a crop which it makes one’s heart cold to
think of. The devil, too, whose special crop they are, will see that
they thrive, and you, and nobody else will have to reap them; and no
common reaping will get them out of the soil, which must be dug down
deep again and again. Well for you if, with all your care, you can make
the ground sweet again by your dying day. “Boys will be boys,” is not
much better, but that has a true side to it; but this encouragement to
the sowing of wild oats is simply devilish, for it means that a young
man is to give way to the temptations and follow the lusts of his
age. What are we to do with the wild oats of manhood and old age—with
ambition, over-reaching, the false weights, hardness, suspicion,
avarice—if the wild oats of youth are to be sown and not burnt? What
possible distinction can we draw between them? If we may sow the one,
why not the other?