THE
Power Of Womanhood

OR
MOTHERS AND SONS

A BOOK FOR PARENTS, AND THOSE IN
LOCO PARENTIS

BY

ELLICE HOPKINS

author of "life and letters of james hinton,"
"wars among workingmen," etc.

Sow an act, and you reap a habit: Sow a habit, and you reap a character: Sow a character, and you reap a destiny.

NEW YORK

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

31 West Twenty-Third Street

1901

Copyright, 1899
by

E.P. DUTTON & CO.

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

PREFACE

This little book has been written under great physical disabilities, chiefly while wandering about in search of health, and consequently far from the libraries which would have enabled me to give proper references to all my quotations. Often for a whole year I have been unable to touch it; but again and again I have returned to my task, feeling it worth any risk to mind or body if only in the end its words might prove of some service to the educated mothers of England and America.

Under these circumstances, I know I may plead for indulgence as to any defects its pages may present.

But now that, after six years, I have realized the pretty Eastern proverb, "By patience and perseverance, and a bottle of sweet-oil, the snail at length reaches Jerusalem,"—now that by God's unfailing help I have finished my difficult task, I can but commit the book into the hands of the women who have implanted in me, next to my faith in God, faith in the "Power of Womanhood," and whose faithful adherence and co-operation remain the deepest and most grateful memory of my life. Most of the ordinary means of circulation are closed to a book of this nature. The doors of circulating libraries are for the most part shut; notices in papers for the general public are necessarily few; nor can I any longer hope, as I once did, to visit America, and give it a wide circulation by my own efforts. I can but stretch out my hands to my many dear unknown friends in America,—hands which have grown too weak to hold the sword or lift the banner in a cause for which I have laid down my all,—and ask any mother who may find help or strength in this book to help me in return by placing it in the hands of other mothers of boys she may know, especially,—I would plead,—young mothers. Do not say they are too young to know. If they are not too young to be the mothers of boys, they are not too young to know how to fulfil the responsibility inherent in such motherhood. They at least can begin at the beginning, and not have occasion to say, as so many mothers have said to me, with tears in their eyes, "Oh, if I could only have heard you years ago, what a difference it would have made to me! But now it is too late."

Enable me thus, by your aid, to do some helpful work for that great country which I have ever loved as my own; and which with England is appointed in the Providence of God to lead in the great moral causes of the world.

If, indeed, each mother whom, either by word or deed, I may have helped would do me this service of love now that I am laid aside, not yielding to the first adverse criticism, which is so often only a cry of pain or prejudice, but patiently working on at enlightening and strengthening the hands of other mothers in her own rank of life, what vital work would be done:—work so precious in its very nature, so far-reaching in its consequences, that all the travail and anguish I have endured, all the brokenness of body and soul I have incurred, would not so much as come into mind for joy that a truer manhood is being born into the world, even the manhood of Him who—

"Came on earth that He might show mankind
What 'tis to be aman: to give, not take; To serve, not rule; to nourish, not devour;
To help, not crush; if needs, to die, not live."

2 Belle Vue Gardens
Walpole Road, Brighton,
Nov. 1, 1899.

CONTENTS

"No advice, no exposure, will be of use until the right relation exists between the father and mother and their son. To deserve his confidence, to keep it as the chief treasure committed to them by God;—to be, the father his strength, the mother his sanctification, and both his chosen refuge, through all weakness, evil, danger, and amazement of his young life."

Rushkin.

The
Power of Womanhood

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

In a banquet given in honor of Heinrik Ibsen by a Norwegian society known as the Woman's League, in response to a speech thanking him in the name of the society for all he had done for the cause of women, the poet, while disclaiming the honor of having consciously worked for the woman's cause—indeed, not even being quite clear as to what the woman's cause really was, since in his eyes it was indistinguishable from the cause of humanity—concluded his speech with the words:

"It has always seemed to me that the great problem is to elevate the nation and place it on a higher level. Two factors, the man and the woman, must co-operate for this end, and it lies especially with the mothers of the people, by slow and strenuous work, to arouse in it a conscious sense of culture and discipline. To the woman, then, we must look for the solution of the problem of humanity. It must come from them as mothers: that is the mission that lies before them."

Whether we are admirers of the great Norwegian poet or not, whether we are afflicted with Ibsenism, or regard his peculiar genius in a more critical and dispassionate light, no one would deny to him that deep intuitive insight which belongs to a poet, and which borders so closely on the prophet's gift.

It is now some years since I have been laid aside, owing to the terrible strain and burthen of my ten years' conflict with the evils that are threatening the sanctity of the family, the purity of the home, and all that constitutes the higher life of the nation. But in those ten years the one truth that was burnt into my very soul was the truth enunciated by Ibsen, that it is to the woman that we must look for the solution of the deepest moral problems of humanity, and that the key of those problems lies in the hands of the mothers of our race. They, and they alone, can unlock the door to a purer and a stronger life. This, in Ibsen's words, "is the mission that lies before them." And it is this strong conviction which makes me feel that, even with broken powers and shattered health, I cannot rest from my labors without, at any cost to myself, placing the knowledge and experience gained in those years of toil and sorrow at the disposal of the educated women of the English-speaking world who, either as mothers or in other capacities, have the care and training of the young.

No one recognizes more thankfully than I do the progress that the woman's movement has made during what have been to me years of inaction and suffering. The ever-increasing activity in all agencies for the elevation of women; the multiplication of preventive institutions and rescue societies; above all, that new sense of a common womanhood, that esprit de corps in which hitherto we have been so grievously lacking, and which is now beginning to bind all our efforts together into one great whole—these I thankfully recognize. We no longer each of us set up in separate and somewhat antagonistic individuality our own little private burrow of good works, with one way in and one way out, and nothing else needed for the wants of the universe. We realize now that no one agency can even partially cover the ground, and conferences are now held of all who are working for the good of women and children, to enable the separate agencies to work more effectually into one another's hands and unite more fervently in heart and soul in a common cause. Beneath all this, apart from any external organization whatever, there is a silent work going on in the hearts of thoughtful and educated mothers, which never comes before the public at all, but is silently spreading and deepening under the surface of our life.

But when all this is thankfully recognized and acknowledged, I still cannot help questioning whether the mass of educated women have at all grasped the depth and complexity of the problem with which we have to grapple if we are to fufil our trust as the guardians of the home and family, and those hidden wells of the national life from which spring up all that is best and highest in the national character. Nay, I sometimes fear lest even our increased activity in practical work may not have the effect of calling off our attention from those deep underlying causes which must be dealt with if we are not to engage in the hopeless task of trying to fill a cistern the tap of which has been left running. This absorption in the effect and inattention to the cause is to a certain degree bred in us by the very nature of the duties that devolve upon us as women. John Stuart Mill has compared the life of a woman to an "interrupted sentence." The mere fact that our lives are so interrupted by incessant home calls, and that we are necessarily so concerned in the details of life, is apt to make us wanting in grasp of underlying principles. Perhaps it is the fact of my having been associated all the early years of my life with eminent scientific men that has formed in me a habit of mind always to regard effects in relation to causes, so that merely to cure evil results without striking at the evil cause seems to me, to use a Johnsonian simile, "like stopping up a hole or two of a sieve with the hope of making it hold water."

It is, therefore, on these deeper aspects that more especially bear upon the lives and training of our own sons that I want to write, placing before you some facts which you must know if you are to be their guardians, and venturing to make some suggestions which, as the result of much collective wisdom and prayer, I think may prove helpful to you in that which lies nearest your heart. Only, if some of the facts are such as may prove both painful and disagreeable to you, do not therefore reject them in your ignorance as false. Do not follow the advice of a politician to a friend whom he was urging to speak on some public question. "But how can I?" his friend replied; "I know nothing of the subject, and should therefore have nothing to say." "Oh, you can always get up and deny the facts," was the sardonic reply.

Let me first of all give you my credentials, all the more necessary as my long illness has doubtless made me unknown by name to many of the younger generation, who may therefore question my right to impart facts or make any suggestions at all. Suffer me, therefore, to recount to you how I have gained my knowledge and what are the sources of my information.

In the first place, I was trained for the work by a medical man—my friend Mr. James Hinton—first in his own branch of the London profession, and a most original thinker. To him the degradation of women, which most men accept with such blank indifference, was a source of unspeakable distress. He used to wander about the Haymarket and Piccadilly in London at night, and break his heart over the sights he saw and the tales he heard. The words of the Prophet ground themselves into his very soul, with regard to the miserable wanderers of our streets: "This is a people robbed and spoiled; they are all of them snared in holes and hid in prison-houses; they are for a prey, and none delivereth; for a spoil, and none saith, Restore."

The very first time he came down to me at Brighton, to see if I could give him any help, speaking of all he had seen and heard, his voice suddenly broke, and he bowed his face upon my hands and wept like a child. That one man could suffer as he did over the degradation of this womanhood of ours has always been to me the most hopeful thing I know—a divine earnest of ultimate overcoming. The only thing that seemed in a measure to assuage his anguish was my promise to devote myself to the one work of fighting it and endeavoring to awake the conscience of the nation to some sense of guilt with regard to it. In order to fit me for this work he considered that I ought to know all that he as a medical man knew. He emphatically did not spare me, and often the knowledge that he imparted to me was drowned in a storm of tears. We were to have worked together, but his mind, already unhinged by suffering, ultimately gave way, and, with all that this world could give him—health, fame, wealth, family affection, devoted friends—he died prematurely of a broken heart.

For ten years, therefore, after my friend's death I gave up everything for the purpose of carrying on the work he left me, and beat wearily up and down the three kingdoms, holding meetings, organizing practical work, agitating for the greater legal protection of the young, afterwards embodied in two Acts—one for removing children from dens of infamy and one known as the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which have done much to educate the public sentiment of the country; but always making it my chief object to rouse educated women to face the facts about their own womanhood, and, above all, to rouse mothers to realize the perils of their own boys and to be determined to know enough to enable them to act as their guardians.

During those ten years of warfare, passing as I did from family to family, and always concerned with questions that touch upon the innermost shrine of our life, I necessarily became the recipient of many hidden sorrows. In fact, my fellow-creatures used me as a bottomless well into which they could empty their household skeletons; and I used often to reflect with sardonic satisfaction that I should never run dry like other old wells, but that death would come and fill me up with a good wholesome shovelful of earth, and I and my skeletons would lie quiet together. But in this way I gained a knowledge of what is going on under the surface of our life, whether we choose to ignore it or not, which possibly can only come to those who are set apart to be confessors of their kind; and the conclusion was forced upon me that this evil, in one form or another, is more or less everywhere—in our nurseries, in our public, and still more our private, schools, decorously seated on magisterial benches, fouling our places of business, and even sanctimoniously seated in our places of worship.

After the first two years of work among women I found that it was absolutely hopeless attacking the evil from one side only, and I had to nerve myself as best I could to address large mass meetings of men, always taking care clearly to define my position—that I had not come upon that platform to help them, but to ask them to help me in a battle that I had found too hard for me, and that I stood before them as a woman pleading for women. The first of these meetings I addressed at the instance of the late revered Bishop of Durham, Dr. Lightfoot, who took the chair, and inaugurated the White Cross Movement, which has since spread over the civilized world. And throughout this most difficult side of my work I had his priceless co-operation and approval; besides the wise counsel, guidance, and unfailing sympathy of one whom but to name is to awake the deepest springs of reverence, Dr. Wilkinson, then the incumbent of St. Peter's, Eaton Square, afterwards Bishop of Truro, and now Bishop of St. Andrews. But so great was the effort that it cost me, that I do not think I could have done this part of my work but for my two favorite mottoes—the one, that "I can't" is a lie in the lips that repeat, "I believe in the Holy Ghost"; the other, received from the lips of Bishop Selwyn, that "If as soldiers of the Cross we stick at anything, we are disgraced forever."

But lastly, and perhaps best of all, as giving weight to any suggestions that I may make, across the dismal mud swamp that I often trod with such an aching heart and faltering steps came to meet me God's best and highest, with outstretched hands of help and encouragement. It was the highly-cultivated and thoughtful women who, amidst the storm of obloquy that beat upon me from every quarter, first ranged themselves by my side, perceiving that the best way to avoid a danger is not to refuse to see it. Some were women already in the field in connection with Mrs. Butler's movement, to which our nation owes so much, some were roused by my words.

In all our large towns where I formed Associations for the Care of Friendless Girls I was in the habit of reporting my work to the clergy of my own church, whose sympathy and cooperation I shall ever gratefully acknowledge. Ultimately, the leading laity, as well as some Nonconformist ministers, joined with us; often these conferences were diocesan meetings—to which, however, Nonconformists were invited—with the Bishop of the diocese in the chair; and after my address free discussion took place, so that I had the advantage of hearing the opinions and judgments of many of our leading men in regard to this difficult problem, and getting at men's views of the question.

The matter that I lay before you, therefore, has been thoroughly and repeatedly threshed out at such conferences, as well as in long, earnest, private talks with the wisest and most experienced mothers and teachers of our day; and it is in their name, far more than in my own, that I ask you to ponder what I say.

Do not, however, be under any fear that I intend in these pages to make myself the medium of all sorts of horrors. I intend to do no such thing. It is but very little evil that you will need to know, and that not in detail, in order to guard your own boys. We women, thank God, have to do with the fountain of sweet waters, clear as crystal, that flow from the throne of God; not with the sewer that flows from the foul imaginations and actions of men. Our part is the inculcation of positive purity, not the part of negative warning against vice. Nor need you fear that the evil you must know, in order to fulfil your most sacred trust, will sully you. This I say emphatically, that the evil which we have grappled with to save one of our own dear ones does not sully. It is the evil that we read about in novels and newspapers, for our own amusement; it is the evil that we weakly give way to in our lives; above all, it is the destroying evil that we have refused so much as to know of in our absorbing care for our own alabaster skin—it is that evil which defiles the woman. But the evil that we have grappled with in a life and death struggle to save a soul for whom Christ died does not sully: it clothes from head to foot with the white robe, it crowns with the golden crown. Though I have had to know what, thank God! no other woman may ever again be called upon to know, I can yet speak of the great conflict that involved this knowledge as being the one great purifying, sanctifying influence of my life. But even if, as men would often persuade us, the knowledge of the world's evil would sully us, I know I utter the heart of every woman when I say that we choose the hand that is sullied in saving our own dear ones from the deep mire that might otherwise have swallowed them up, rather than the hand that has kept itself white and pure because it has never been stretched out to save. That hand may be white, but in God's sight it is white with the whiteness of leprosy. Believe, rather, the words of James Hinton, written to a woman friend: "You women have been living in a dreamland of your own; but dare to live in this poor disordered world of God's, and it will work out in you a better goodness than your own,"—even that purified womanhood, strong to know, and strong to save, before whose gracious loveliness the strongest man grows weak as a child, and, as a little child, grows pure.

God grant that, in view of the tremendous responsibilities that devolve upon us women in these latter days, we may cry from our hearts:

"Let not fine culture, poesy, art, sweet tones,
Build up about my soothed sense a world
That is not Thine, and wall me up in dreams.
So my sad heart may cease to beat with Thine,
The great World-Heart, whose blood, forever shed,
Is human life, whose ache is man's dull pain."

CHAPTER II

"WHY SHOULD I INTERFERE?"

I am, of course, aware that at the very outset I shall be met by the question—far less frequently urged, however, by thoughtful mothers than it used to be—"Why need I interfere at all in a subject like this? Why may I not leave it all to the boy's father? Why should it be my duty to face a question which is very distasteful to me, and which I feel I had much better let alone?"

I would answer at once, Because the evil is so rife, the dangers so great and manifold, the temptations so strong and subtle, that your influence must be united to that of the boy's father if you want to safeguard him. Every influence you can lay hold of is needed here, and will not prove more than enough. The influence of one parent alone is not sufficient, more especially as there are potent lines of influence open to you as a woman from which a man, from the very fact that he is a man, is necessarily debarred.

You must bring the whole of that influence to bear for the following considerations.

Let me take the lowest and simplest first. Even if you be indifferent to your boy's moral welfare, you cannot be indifferent to his physical well-being, nay, to his very existence. Here I necessarily cannot tell you all I know; but I would ask you thoughtfully to study for yourself a striking diagram which Dr. Carpenter, in one of our recognized medical text-books, has reproduced from the well-known French statistician, Quetelet, showing the comparative viability, or life value, of men and women respectively at different ages.

diagram representing the comparative viability of the male and female at different ages.

The female line, where it differs from the male, is the dotted line, the greater or less probability or value of life being shown by the greater or less distance of the line of life from the level line at the bottom. Infant life being very fragile, the line steadily rises till it reaches its highest point, between thirteen and fourteen. In both cases there is then a rapid fall, the age of puberty being a critical age. But from fifteen, when the female line begins to right itself, only showing by a gentle curve downwards the added risks of the child-bearing period in a woman's life, the male line, which ought, without these risks, to keep above the female line, makes a sharp dip below it, till it reaches its lowest point at twenty-five, the age when the excesses of youth have had time to tell most on the system.[1] Here, at least, is evidence that none can gainsay. The more you ponder that mysterious sharp dip in the man's line of life at the very age which Nature intended should be the prime and flower of life, the more deeply you will feel that some deep and hidden danger lies concealed there, the more earnestly you will come to the conclusion that you cannot and will not thrust from you the responsibility that rests upon you as the boy's mother of helping to guard him from it. Keep him from the knowledge of evil, and the temptations that come with that knowledge, you cannot. The few first days at school will insure that, to say nothing of the miserable streets of our large towns. As Thackeray long ago said in a well-known passage, much animadverted on at the time:

"And by the way, ye tender mothers and sober fathers of Christian families, a prodigious thing that theory of life is, as orally learnt at a great public school. Why! if you could hear those boys of fourteen who blush before their 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 Pen was twelve years old, and while his mother thought him an angel of candour, little Pen had heard 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 Christmas 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 very fast round him, and that we are helping as much as possible to corrupt him."[2]

But though you cannot keep him from the knowledge of evil, you can be a potent factor in teaching him the hidden dangers that beset him, in seeing that his young feet rest on the rock of true knowledge, and not on the shifting quagmire of the devil's lies; but above all, in inspiring him with a high ideal of conduct, which will make him shrink from everything low and foul as he would from card-sharping or sneaking, proving yourself thus to him as far as in you lies—

"A perfect woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a spirit still, and bright
With something of an angel light."

The boy thus mothered is saved as a rule from all physical risk.

And this in part anticipates my second point. You cannot let this question alone if you are to aim at the highest for your boy. High character is more to be accounted of than long life. And it is to you, as a woman, that the guarding of the higher springs of his nature is especially entrusted. My whole experience has gone to teach me, with ever-increasing force, that the proposition that purity is vitally necessary for the woman, but of comparatively small account for the man, is absolutely false. Granted that, owing to social ostracism, the outward degradation of impurity to the woman is far greater, I contend that a deeper inner debasement is its sure fruition in the man. Cruelty and lies are its certain accompaniment. As Burns, with a poet's insight, has truly said:

"But oh! it hardens a' within,
And petrifies the feeling."

Yes, it is exactly that; "it hardens all within"—hardens and darkens. It is as our Lord says: only "the pure in heart" are capable of divine vision. Only the man who has kept himself pure, who has never sullied his white faith in womanhood, never profaned the sacred mysteries of life and love, never fouled his manhood in the stye of the beast—it is only that man who can see God, who can see duty where another sees useless sacrifice, who can see and grasp abiding principles in a world of expediency and self-interest, and discern

"In temporal policy the eternal Will,"

who can see God in the meanest of His redeemed creatures. It is only the virginal heart that has kept itself pure, that grows not old, but keeps its freshness, its innocent gaiety, its simple pleasures. The eminent Swiss Professor, Aimé Humbert, does but echo these words from the sadder side, when, speaking of the moral malady which is the result of impurity, he says:

"It does not attack any single organ of the human frame, but it withers all that is human—mind, body, and soul. It strikes our youth at the unhappy moment when they first cross the thresholds of vice. For them the spring has no more innocent freshness; their very friendships are polluted by foul suggestions and memories; they become strangers to all the honorable relations of a pure young life; and thus we see stretching wider and wider around us the circle of this mocking, faded, worn-out, sceptical youth, without poetry and without love, without faith and without joy."

Too soon and too earnestly we cannot teach our boys that the flaming sword, turning all ways, which guards the tree of life for him, is purity.

But thirdly, there are wider issues than the welfare, physical and moral, of our own boys which make it impossible for us to take up any neutral attitude on this question. We cannot remain indifferent to that which affects so deeply both the status and the happiness of women. We cannot accept a standard for men which works out with the certainty of a mathematical law a pariah class of women. We cannot leave on one side the anguish of working-class mothers just because we belong to the protected classes, and it is not our girls that are sacrificed. At least, we women are ceasing to be as base as that, and God forgive us that, from want of thought rather than from want of heart, educated women could be found even to hold that the degradation of their own womanhood is a necessity!

Take but one instance out of the many that crossed my via dolorosa of the anguish inflicted on the mothers of the poor. I take it, not because it is uncommon, but because it is typical.

At one of my mass meetings of working women in the North I was told at its close that a woman wished to speak with me in private. As soon as I could disengage myself from the crowd of mothers who were always eager to shake hands with me, and to bless me with tears in their eyes for taking up their cause, I went down the room, and there, in a dimly-lighted corner of the great hall, I found a respectable-looking woman waiting for me. I sat down by her side, and she poured out the pent-up sorrow of her heart before telling me the one great favor she craved at my hands. She had an only daughter, who at the age of sixteen she had placed out in service, at a carefully-chosen situation. We all know what a difficult age in a girl's life is sixteen; but our girls we can keep under our own watchful care, and their little wilfulnesses and naughtinesses are got over within the four walls of a loving home, and are only the thorns that precede the perfect rose of womanhood. But the poor have to send their girls out into the great wicked world at this age to be bread-winners, often far away from a mother's protecting care. The girl, however, in this case was a good, steady girl, and for a time did well. Then something unsettled her, and she left her first place, and got another situation. For a time it seemed all right, when suddenly her letters ceased. The mother wrote again and again, but got no answer. She wrote to her former place; they knew nothing of her. At last she saved up a little money and went to the town where she believed her girl to be. She sought out and found her last address. The family had gone away, and left no address. She made inquiries of the neighbors, of the police. Yes, they remembered the girl—a nice-looking girl with a bright color; but no one had seen her lately. It was as if a trap-door had opened and let her through. She had simply disappeared. In all that crowded city her mother could find no trace of her. "It is now thirteen years, ma'am, since I lost her."

But all through those thirteen years that poor mother had watched and waited for her. All through those weary years, whenever she read in the local paper of some poor girl's body being found in the river, some poor suicide, who had leapt,

"Mad from life's history,
Swift to death's mystery,
Anywhere, anywhere, out of the world,"

that poor mother would get into her head it might be her dear girl that was lying there alone and unclaimed; and she would pay her fare—if she could afford it—or if not, trudge the distance on foot, creep, trembling, into the mortuary or the public-house where the body lay, blue from drowning, or with the ugly red gash across the throat, take one look, and then cry with a sigh of relief, "No, it ain't my child," and return again to her watching and waiting.

"Once, ma'am," she said, "I had a dream. I saw a beautiful place, all bright and shiny, and there were lots of angels singing so sweet, when out of the midst of the glory came my poor girl. She came straight to me, and said, 'Oh, mother, don't fret; I'm safe and I'm happy!' and with those words in my ears I awoke. That dream has been a great comfort to me, ma'am; I feel sure God sent it to me. But oh, ma'am," she exclaimed, with a new light of hope in her face, and clasping her hands in silent entreaty, "the thought came into my head whilst you were a-speakin', if you would be so kind as to ask at the end of every one of your meetin's, 'Has anyone heard or seen anything of a girl of the name of Sarah Smith?' As you go all about the country, maybe I might get to hear of her that way."

Ah me! the pathetic forlornness of the suggestion, the last hope of a broken-hearted mother, that I should go all over the three kingdoms asking my large audiences, "Have you seen or heard anything of Sarah Smith?" And I was dumb. I had not a word of comfort to give her. I had heard the words too often from the lips of outcast girls in answer to my question, "Does your mother know where you are?" "Oh, no; I couldn't bear that mother should know about me!"—not to know what the fate of that young girl had been. She had been trapped, or drugged, or enticed into that dread under-world into which so many of our working-class girls disappear and are lost. Possibly she had been sent out of the country, and was in some foreign den. One's best hope was that she was dead.

But picture to yourselves the long-drawn anguish of that mother, with nothing but a dream to comfort her amid the dread realities of life. Picture her as only one of thousands and thousands of our working-class mothers on whose poor dumb hearts the same nameless sorrow rests like a gravestone; and I think no woman—no mother, at least—but will agree with me, that this is a matter from which we, as women, cannot stand off. Even if we had not the moral and physical welfare of our own boys to consider, we are baptized into this cause by the tears of women, the dumb tears of the poor. But there is one last consideration, exquisitely painful as it is, which I cannot, I dare not, pass over, and which more than any other has aroused the thoughtful women of England and America to face the question and endeavor to grapple, however imperfectly as yet, with the problem. For some strange reason the whole weight of this evil in its last resort comes crushing down on the shoulders of a little child—infant Christs of the cross without the crown, "martyrs of the pang, without the palm." The sins of their parents are visited on them from their birth, in scrofula, blindness, consumption. "Disease and suffering," in Dickens's words, "preside over their birth, rock their wretched cradles, nail down their little coffins, and fill their unknown graves." More than one-half of the inmates of our Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children are sent there by vice. But would to God it were only innocent suffering that is inflicted on the children of our land. Alas! alas! when I first began my work, a ward in a large London penitentiary, I found, was set apart for degraded children! Or take that one brief appalling statement in the record of ten years of work—1884 to 1894—issued by a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. In the classification of the various victims it is stated that the society had dealt with 4460 pitiable child victims of debauchery! Alas for our England, and the debasement which a low moral standard for men has made possible in our midst! And, judging by the absence of proper legal protection and the extraordinarily low age of consent adopted by some of the States of the Union, I fear things are not much better in America.

One of our sweetest poets, Charles Tennyson Turner, in an exquisite sonnet on a three-year-old child being presented with a toy globe, has portrayed the consecration of a child's innocence, bathing the world itself in its baptismal dew:

"She patted all the world; old empires peep'd
Between her baby fingers; her soft hand
Was welcome at all frontiers."

And when at length they turn "her sweet unlearned eye" "on our own isle," she utters a little joyous cry:

"Oh yes, I see it! Letty's home is there!
And while she hid all England with a kiss,
Bright over Europe fell her golden hair."

By the side of that exquisite picture of the beatitude of a child's innocence place the picture of that long procession of desecrated children, with no "sweet unlearned eye," but eyes learned in the worst forms of human wickedness and cruelty; and let any woman say, if she can or dare, that this is a subject on which she is not called to have any voice and which she prefers to let alone. Surely our womanhood has not become in these last days such a withered and wilted thing that our ears have grown too nice for the cry of these hapless children! As women, we are the natural guardians of the innocence of all children. The divine motherhood that is at the heart of every woman worthy of the name "rises up in wrath" within us and cries: "We will fulfil our trust, not only to our own children, but to the helpless children of the poor." The day is at hand when every mother of boys will silently vow before God to send at least one knight of God into the world to fight an evil before which even a child's innocence is not sacred and which tramples under its swine's feet the weak and the helpless.

Indeed, when one reflects that this great moral problem touches all the great trusts of our womanhood, the sanctity of the family, the purity of the home, the sacredness of marriage, the sweet innocence of children, it seems like some evil dream that women can ever have asked, "Why cannot I leave this matter to men? Why should I interfere?"

FOOTNOTES:

[ [1] Dr. Carpenter does not hesitate to attribute this sharp dip in the male line of life to the indulgence of the passions in youth, and the subsequent rise to marriage and a more regular life.

[ [2] Pendennis, vol. i., p. 16.

CHAPTER III

FIRST PRINCIPLES

"But what can we do?" will be the next question, uttered perhaps in the forlorn accents of a latent despair.

Before answering this question in detail, I would endeavor to impress two cardinal points upon you.

The first point I want you to recognize, though it may seem to minister to the very hopelessness which most lames and cripples for effective action, is the depth and magnitude of the problem we have to grapple with. All other great social evils, with the possible exception of greed or covetousness, which in Scripture is often classed with impurity, may be looked upon as more or less diseases of the extremities. But the evil which we are now considering is no disease of the extremities, but a disease at the very heart of our life, attacking all the great bases on which it rests. It is not only the negation of the sanctity of the family and the destroyer of the purity of the home, as I have already pointed out, but it is also the derider of the sacredness of the individual, the slow but sure disintegrator of the body politic, the dry-rot of nations, before which the mightiest empires have crumbled into dust. The lagoons of Venice mirror it in the departed grandeur of her palaces, overthrown by the licentiousness of her merchant princes. The mute sands that silt up the ruins of old empires are eloquent of it. The most brilliant civilization the world has even seen through it became the most transitory. Even the vast and massive structure of the Roman Empire, undermined by moral corruption, vanished before barbarian hordes like the baseless fabric of a dream. To think that we can solve a problem of this depth and magnitude by any mere external means—as so many good and earnest women seem to imagine—by any multiplication of Rescue Societies, Preventive Institutions, and other benevolent organizations—is to think that we can plug up a volcano with sticks and straws. The remedy, like the evil, must be from within, and must to a great degree revolutionize our life.

My second cardinal point is, that the first step we have to take, the step which must precede all others, if anything is to be of the least avail, must be to restore the moral law and get rid of the double standard. I know well how much has been said and written on this point; it has been insisted on possibly ad nauseam. But even now I do not think we fully realize how completely we have been in the grasp of a "tradition of the elders," which has emphatically "made the law of God of none effect." Side by side with the ethics of Christianity have grown up the bastard ethics of society, widely divergent from the true moral order. Man has accepted the obligation of purity so far as it subserves his own selfish interests and enables him to be sure of his own paternity and safeguard the laws of inheritance. The precepts which were primarily addressed to the man, as the very form of the Greek words demonstrate, were tacitly transferred to the woman. When, in a standard dictionary of the English language, I look out the word "virtue," which etymologically means "manliness"—the manliness which would scorn to gratify its own selfish passions at the cost of the young, the poor, and the weak, at the cost of a woman—I find one of its meanings defined, not as male but as "female chastity." Long ago I suggested that as manliness thus goes by default, the word had better be changed from virtue to "muliertue."

In a passage in one of our standard school-books, Green's Short History of the English People, the historian, alluding to the coarseness of the early Elizabethan drama, remarks that "there were no female actors, and the grossness which startles us in words which fall from a woman's lips took a different color when every woman's part was acted by a boy."[3] Why, in the name of all moral sense, should it be less dreadful that gross and obscene passages should be uttered at a public spectacle by young and unformed boys than by adult women, who at least would have the safeguard of mature knowledge and instincts to teach them their full loathsomeness? Do we really think that boys are born less pure than girls? Does the mother, when her little son is born, keep the old iron-moulded flannels, the faded basinette, the dirty feeding-bottle for him with the passing comment, "Oh, it is only a boy!" Is anything too white and fine and pure for his infant limbs, and yet are we to hold that anything is good enough for his childish soul—even, according to Mr. Green, the grossness of the early Elizabethan stage—because he is a boy? But I ask how many readers of that delightful history would so much as notice this passage, and not, on the contrary, quietly accept it without inward note or comment, possessed as we are, often without knowing it, by our monstrous double standard?

If we want to see what is the final outcome of this moral code, of this one-sided and distorted ethic, we have only to turn our eyes to France. On the one hand we have "la jeune fille" in her white Communion robe, kept so pure and ignorant of all evil, that "une société ecclésiastique," I am told, exists for the emendation of history for her benefit—Divine Providence, as conducting the affairs of men, being far too coarse for her pure gaze; and at the other end of the stick we find Zola, and a literature intended only for the eyes of men, of whose chastity, according to Renan, "Nature takes no account whatever,"—a literature which fouls with its vile sewage the very wellsprings of our nature, and which, whatever its artistic merit, I make bold to say is a curse to the civilized world.

Now, I earnestly protest that while we have this social code, which is in direct violation of the moral law, we may set on foot any number of Rescue Societies, Preventive Agencies, Acts for the Legal Protection of the Young, etc., but all our efforts will be in vain. We are like a man who should endeavor to construct a perfect system of dynamics on the violation of Newton's first law of motion. The tacitly accepted necessity for something short of the moral law for men will—again I say it—work out with the certainty of a mathematical law a degraded and outcast class, with its disease, its insanity, its foul contamination of the young, its debasement of manhood, its disintegration of the State, its curse to the community. You cannot dodge the moral law; as Professor Clifford said, "There are no back-stairs to the universe" by which we can elude the consequences of our wrong, whether of thought or action. If you let in one evil premise by the back-door, be sure Sin and Death will come out at the front.

Here, then, you must take a firm and watchful stand. As the mothers of the future generation of men, you must look upon it as your divinely-appointed task to bring back the moral law in its entirety, the one standard equally binding on men and women alike. Whatever your creed, you have got to hold fast to this great truth, which life itself forces upon you, and which is a truth of Christian ethics because first of all it is a truth of life. It is simply a moral Q.E.D., that if chastity is a law for women—and no man would deny that—it is a law for every woman without exception; and if it is a law for every woman, it follows necessarily that it must be for every man, unless we are going to indulge in the moral turpitude of accepting a pariah class of women made up of other women's daughters and other women's sisters—not our own, God forbid that they should be our own!—set apart for the vices of men.

But perhaps, looking at our complicated civilization, which, at least in the upper classes, involves, as a rule, the deferring of marriage—looking at the strength of the passions which generations of indulgence have evolved beyond their natural limits, some women will feel constrained to ask, "Is this standard a possible one? Can men keep their health and strength as celibates? Is not my husband right when he says that this is a subject we women can know nothing about, and that here we must bow to the judgment of men?"

I answer that a mother must know by what standard she is to educate her boy, and therefore must have the data supplied to her on which to form her own judgment, and be fully persuaded in her own mind what she is to aim at in the training she is to give him; and the mere fact that the current judgment of men involves the sacrifice in body and soul of a large class of our fellow-women lays a paramount obligation upon all women to search for themselves into the truth and scientific accuracy of the premises on which that judgment is based.

"Can men keep their health and strength as celibates till such time as they have the means to marry?" is the question we have, then, to face. Is the standard of the moral law possible to men who have to maintain a high level of physical efficiency in the sharp competition of modern life?

Primarily, the answer to this question must come from the acknowledged heads of the medical profession. Now, I am thankful to say, we have in England a consensus of opinion from the representative men of the faculty that no one can gainsay. Sir James Paget, Acton in his great text-book, Sir Andrew Clark, Sir George Humphrey, of Cambridge, Professor Millar, of the Edinburgh University, Sir William Gowers, F.R.S., have all answered the above question in the strongest affirmative. "Chastity does no harm to body or mind; its discipline is excellent; marriage may safely be waited for," are Sir James Paget's terse and emphatic words[4]. Still more emphatic are the words of Sir William Gowers, the great men's specialist, who counts as an authority on the Continent as well as here:

"The opinions which on grounds falsely called 'physiological' suggest or permit unchastity are terribly prevalent among young men, but they are absolutely false. With all the force of any knowledge I possess, and any authority I have, I assert that this belief is contrary to fact; I assert that no man ever yet was in the slightest degree or way the worse for continence or better for incontinence. From incontinence during unmarried life all are worse morally; a clear majority, are, in the end, worse physically; and in no small number the result is, and ever will be, utter physical shipwreck on one of the many rocks, sharp, jagged-edged, which beset the way, or on one of the banks of festering slime which no care can possibly avoid. They are rocks which tear and rend the unhappy being who is driven against them when he has yielded to the tide of passion, they are banks which exhale a poison for which, no true antidote exists."

In face of such testimony as this, well might Mr. George Russell, in an address to young men, speak of "this exploded lie which has hitherto led so many astray."

Turning now from knowledge to fact, we have only to look at the French clergy to see that even in the extreme case of life-long celibacy it is not injurious to health. I know, in taking this case, I am grating somewhat harshly against Protestant prejudice. But the testimony that Renan bears on this point is irrefutable. Himself a renegade priest, he certainly would not have hesitated to expose the Order to which he had once belonged, and vindicate his broken vows by the revelation of any moral rottenness known within the walls of its seminaries. Far from this, he bears the most emphatic testimony in his autobiography that there is enough virtue in St. Sulpice alone to convert the world; and owns so strong was the impress made on his own soul by his training as a priest that personally he had lived a pure life, "although," he adds, with an easy shrug of his shoulders, "it is very possible that the libertine has the best of it!" Another renegade priest, also eminent in literature, bears exactly the same testimony. Indeed, when we remember the argus-eyed hatred with which the French priesthood is watched by the anti-clerical party, and the few scandals that appear in the public prints only too anxious to give publicity to them, this unimpeachable testimony is borne out by fact. I believe this testimony to be equally true of the English and Irish Roman Catholic clergy. Yet few would dispute the vigor of the physique of the Roman Catholic priests, or their capacity for hard and often exhausting work.

Let me, however, guard myself from misapprehension. That a celibate life, combined with rich feeding, French novels, and low thinking, does produce a great deal of physical harm goes almost without saying. Nature, like her Lord, requires truth in the inward parts, and takes but small care of outward respectabilities that are but the whitewashed graves of inward foulness. Surely Lowell is right when he says, "I hold unchastity of mind to be worse than that of body." To live the unmarried life one must, of course, fulfil its conditions of plain living and clean thinking.

It is almost with a feeling of shame that I have dwelt at some length on the point we have been considering; but all through my ten years of work the sunken rock on which I was always making shipwreck was the necessity of the evil—often openly avowed by men, but haunting even the minds of women like a shadow—a shadow which gained solidity and substance from a sense of their helpless ignorance. I have even met with Christian women who have serenely averred to my face that they have been told, on authority that they could not question, that, were it not for the existence of an outcast class, no respectable woman would be safe and we could not insure the purity of the home! So low had the moral consciousness fallen, through ignorance and thoughtless acceptance of the masculine code, that women calling themselves Christians could be found who seemed wholly unconscious of the deep inner debasement of accepting the degradation of other women as a safeguard to our own virtue and of basing the purity of the Christian home on the ruined bodies and souls of the children of the poor. Truly the dark places of the world within, as well as of the world without, are full of cruelty!

What can I do, in the face of such an experience as this, but humbly and earnestly beseech the women of England and America not to play fast and loose with the moral sense within them—- which is God's voice within us—but to hold fast to the moral law, one, equal, and indivisible, for men and women alike; and to know and feel sure that, whatever else is bound up with the nature of man or with an advancing civilization, the hopeless degradation of woman is not that something. It is God who has made us—not we ourselves, with our false codes, false notions, and false necessities; and God has made the man to love the woman and give himself for her, not to degrade her and destroy the very function for which she was made the blessed "mother of all living."

Only be sure of this: that men will rise to the level of any standard that we set them. For the present standard of what Sainte Beuve calls "l'homme sensuel moyen," which we have accepted and tacitly endorsed, we women are largely to blame. In my conferences with the clergy and earnest laity held in all our large towns it was always this that men spoke of as the greatest stumbling-block in their way. With the utmost bitterness they would urge that men of known fast life were admitted into society, that women seemed to prefer them rather than not; and it seemed to make no difference to them what kind of life a man led—whether he reverenced their womanhood or not. How could I deny this bitter accusation in the face of facts? All I could urge in extenuation was that I believed it was due rather to the ignorance than to the indifference of women, owing to the whole of this dark side of life having been carefully veiled from their view; but now that this ignorance was passing away, I was only one of hundreds of women who ask nothing better than to lay down their lives in the cause of their own womanhood. Only when women learn to respect themselves; only when no woman worthy the name will receive into her own drawing-room in friendly intercourse with her own girls the man who has done his best to make her womanhood a vile and desecrated thing; only when no mother worthy the name will, for the sake of wealth or position,—what is called "a good match,"—give her pure girl to a man on the very common conditions, as things have been, that some other ten or twenty young girls—some poor mothers' daughters—have been degraded and cast aside into the gutter, that she, the twenty-first in this honorable harem, may be held in apparent honor as a wife; only when no woman worthy the name will marry under the conditions portrayed by our great novelist, George Eliot,—that of another woman being basely forsaken for her sake—then, and then only, will this reproach that men level at us drop off; then, and then only, shall we be able to save our own sons and bring in a better and purer state of things, enabling them to fight the battle of their life at less tremendous odds; then, and then only, shall we be able to evolve the true manhood, whose attitude is not to defile and destroy, but "to look up and to lift up."

FOOTNOTES:

[ [3] Short History of the English People, by J.R. Green, p. 247.

[ [4] See a little White Cross paper entitled, Medical Testimony.

CHAPTER IV

THE SECRET AND METHOD

There is a simile of Herbert Spencer's, in his book on Sociology, which has often helped me in dealing with great moral problems. He says:

"You see that wrought-iron plate is not quite flat; it sticks up a little here towards the left, 'cockles,' as we say. How shall we flatten it? Obviously, you reply, by hitting down on the part that is prominent. Well, here is a hammer, and I give the plate a blow as you advise. Harder, you say. Still no effect. Another stroke. Well, there is one, and another, and another. The prominence remains, you see; the evil is as great as ever, greater, indeed. But this is not all. Look at the warp which the plate has got near the opposite edge. Where it was flat before it is now curved. A pretty bungle we have made of it! Instead of curing the original defect, we have produced a second. Had we asked an artisan practised in 'planishing,' as it is called, he would have told us that no good was to be done, but only mischief, by hitting down on the projecting part. He would have taught us how to give variously directed and specially adjusted blows with a hammer elsewhere, so attacking the evil not by direct but by indirect actions. The required process is less simple than you thought. Even a sheet of metal is not to be successfully dealt with after those common-sense methods in which you have so much confidence. 'Do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?' asked Hamlet. Is humanity more readily straightened than an iron plate?"[5]

Now, in our moral "planishing" we need to know where and how to direct our blows, lest in endeavoring to lessen the evil we not only increase the evil itself, but produce other evils almost as great as the one we intended to cure. The mistake that we commit—and this is, I think, especially true of us women—is to rush at our moral problems without giving a moment's thought to their causes, which often lie deep hidden in human nature. Our great naturalist, Darwin, gave eight years' study to our lowly brother, the barnacle; he gave an almost equal amount of time to the study of the earthworm and its functions, revealing to us, in one of his most charming books, how much of our golden harvest, of our pastures, and our jewelled garden-beds, we owe to this silent and patient laborer. Yet we think that we can deal with our higher and more complex human nature without giving it any study at all. We hit down directly on its moral inequalities, without giving a thought to what has caused the imperfection, when constantly, as in the sheet of metal which has to be straightened, the moral disorder has to be met, not directly, but indirectly—not at the point of the disorder itself, but of its often unsuspected cause. Purity, like health, like happiness, like so many of the higher aims of our life, has to be attained altruistically. Seek them too directly, and they elude our grasp. Like the oarsman, we have often to turn our back upon our destination in order to arrive at our end.

Do not, therefore, think impatiently that I am putting you off with vague theories when you want practical suggestions, if I ask you first to give some patient thought to the causes of the disorder which seems to mark the side of our human nature on which the very existence of the race depends, and which cannot, therefore, be evil in itself. To me the problem presented was almost paralyzing. It seemed as if Nature, in her anxiety to secure the continuance of the species, had taken no account whatever of the moral law, but had so overloaded the strength of passion as not only to secure the defeat of the moral law, but even of her own ends, by producing the sterility which results from vicious indulgence. It was not till I met with two wonderful sermons on "The Kingdom of God," by that great master of "divine philosophy," Dr. James Martineau, that I first got a clue to the moral difficulty and to that fuller understanding of our human nature which is so essential to all who have the training and moulding of the young. And, therefore, I ask you to let me enter at some length into this teaching, which will not only give us light for our own guidance, but enable us to grasp the right principles on which we have to act in the moral training of the coming generation.[6]

Now, in trying to think out the laws of our own being, we are met at the very outset by the great crux in the moral world: What is the true relation of the material to the spiritual,—of the body, with its instincts and appetites, to the moral personality, with its conscience and will? On the one hand, seeing the fatal proneness of man to obey his appetites and run into terrible excesses, ascetics in all ages and of all creeds have taught that the body itself is evil and the seat of sin; that its instincts must be crushed and its appetites repressed and eradicated; and that it is only so far as you trample your animal nature under foot that you can rise to be a saint. "Brute," "blind," "dead," have been the epithets bestowed on matter, which is a ceaseless play of living forces that rest not day nor night. To look down on the material pleasures with suspicion, to fly contact with the rude world and lose one's self in the unembodied splendors of the spiritual, to save souls rather than men and women, to preach abstract doctrines rather than grapple with hideous concrete problems—this has been the tendency of the religious spirit in all ages, a tendency of which positive asceticism, with its mortification of the body, and its ideal of virginity, and marriage regarded as more or less a concession to the flesh, is only an exaggeration.

On the other hand, in disgust at the mutilation of human nature and under pretext of its consummation, has arisen the "fleshly school," whose maxim is "obedience to Nature,"—leaving undefined what nature, the nature of the swine or the nature of the man,—which holds that every natural instinct ought to be obeyed, which takes the agreeable as the test of the right, and which goes in for the "healthy animal" with enlightened self-interest as the safeguard against excesses.

Alas! the results are no happier. The healthy animal treads under his feet the helpless and the weak, who suffer that he may grow fat and kick. The attractive warmth and color and richness are found to be but rottenness and decay.

When, dissatisfied with the teaching of men, one turns to the great world at large, to see whether some practical instinct may not have guided men to a right adjustment, one's first feeling is one of dismay at the spectacle presented. The bodily instincts and appetites that seem to work aright in the animal world, in man seem fatally overloaded, and, instead of hitting the mark, explode with disaster and death at the outset.

Let us now turn to the teaching of Christ, and see whether it does not explain the deep disorder of the animal instincts in the world of man, and while saving us on the one hand from the self-mutilation of asceticism, and from the swinishness of the fleshly school on the other, whether it does not embrace the truth that is in both and teach us how to correlate the material and the spiritual.

Now, Dr. Martineau points out that Christ teaches, in contradistinction to asceticism, that the animal body, with its instincts and appetites, is as good on its own plane as the higher and spiritual attributes of man are on theirs. Our Father knoweth that, in common with other creatures, we have need of physical good, and He has provided us with a self-acting mechanism for its attainment, which will work rightly if only it is left alone and not tampered with. There is the same provision in us as in them of unconscious instincts and appetites for carrying on the lower life which is necessary as the platform of the higher spiritual being, to set it free, as it were, for the pursuit of its legitimate ends—all those higher and wider interests in life which are comprised under the one comprehensive name of "the kingdom of God." And the teaching of Christ is: Neither hate nor fear this part of your nature with the ascetic, nor pamper and stimulate it with the Hedonist, but let it alone to act on its own plane; trust it, trust God who made it, while you throw all your conscious energies into the higher concerns of life; and you will find, when left to its own unconscious activity, it is neither an over-nor an under-provision for carrying on your subsistence and that of the race. "Take no anxious thought (μη μεριμνήσητε) for the morrow." "Your Father knoweth that ye have need of these things," and has arranged your being accordingly. "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added to you." "Behold the birds of the air; your heavenly Father feedeth them."

"Oh," says the practical man at once, "that is all very fine as sentiment; it is very Eastern and poetical; but I should like to know how, in these overcrowded days, I could support myself and family if I am to trust God to feed me and them like the birds of the air, and only think about religion." But is not this wholly to misunderstand our Lord's teaching? How does God feed the birds of the air? Is it not by incessant and untiring effort on their part? Those who have watched a pair of birds flying backwards and forwards to the nest under the eave may well question whether industry can go further. But in the unconscious being of a bird it is toil without μεριμνα, without thought and worry, and becomes, therefore, the very picture to us of trust in a higher Power, who has thus adjusted an unerring instinct to an unfailing end. The insect and the bird provide for the morrow, while they take no anxious thought for the morrow. "The agility which achieves it is theirs, the skill and foresight absent from them remain with God. And thus the simple life of lower natures, in its unconscious surrender to involuntary though internal guidance, becomes the negative type of perfect trust."[7]

But to leave his instincts and appetites to work, unimpeded and unconscious, on their own plane, while he concerns himself with matters of truly human interest, is just what man is not content to do. On the contrary, he takes his higher and spiritual nature down into them. He enhances their pleasure with all the powers of his imagination; he sets his intellect to work to plot and plan for their gratification; he loads them with the whole force of his spiritual will, and in so doing he overloads and maddens them. The instinct for food and drink, which in the animal is sufficient for the maintenance of health and activity, in the man becomes gluttony and drunkenness; the instinct for the preservation of the race becomes the licentiousness which produces sterility and defeats its own ends; the instinct of self-maintenance becomes the feverish greed and money-getting which leave no room for the higher life of beauty, and science, and worship, and disinterested service. "Seek ye first the material," says the world, "and all these things shall be added unto you when you get the time for them"—which will be probably never.

Now, then, do we not begin to see why the animal instincts and appetites, which make for order and happiness, and fufil their end in the animal world, lead to such intolerable disorder in the world of man? Their laws, like all other laws in the Divine economy, are holy and just and good; but man by not observing their conditions makes them work evil and death. Do you not see that to be a healthy animal is just what man cannot be except by being a true and high-minded man, all his conscious energies taken up and absorbed on a higher plane, with none left over to filter down into and disorder the animal instincts, which only work aright when left to their own unconscious activity? Fix your consciousness long enough on the tip of your little finger, and you will feel a pricking sensation in it. The mind directed intently to any part of the frame will produce a flow of blood there. Any physician will tell you that this is one of the greatest difficulties he has to contend with in his patients; the mind being steadily directed to some disordered spot increases the congestion which is the result of disease.

Unconsciousness, therefore, is the very channel in which our animal nature works healthily and undisturbed according to its own laws. But you are a self-conscious being, and not as the animals. God keeps the keys of their nature in His own hands. They are shut up to certain ends which are in His purpose rather than in their minds. They are locked within limits of their nature, which are absolute, and cannot, therefore, be transgressed. But man, in virtue of his self-consciousness, is emphatically "he who hath the keys, who openeth and no man shutteth, and who shutteth and no man openeth." All the secret recesses of your being lie open to you, and no man can close it to your vision. You can voluntarily shut the door of salvation and hamper the lock, and no man can open. A limit is no absolute limit to you because your very consciousness of the limit involves your consciousness of the beyond which makes it a limit. And therefore to you as a self-knowing existence, with your being necessarily surrendered into your own hands, two faculties have been given as a substitute for the unconscious necessity of an animal nature: First, a self-judging faculty which we call conscience, or a power of discerning between a lower and a higher, and a sense of obligation to the higher which enables you to correlate your faculties and functions in their true order of relative excellence; and secondly, a spiritual will, capable of carrying the decisions of conscience into practical execution and attaining to a necessity of moral law. The true function of man's will is not, therefore, to add itself on to any one of his instincts and give it a disordered strength, but, while throwing its chief conscious energies into the higher interests of life, to rule his instincts and appetites according to those higher interests. This, when the condition of that infinitely complex thing, modern civilized life, interferes, as at times it must do, with the legitimate exercise of his instincts, and his good has to be subordinated to the good of the greater number, may occasionally involve a hard struggle, even when the instincts have been left to their own healthy natural play; but at least it will be all the difference between a struggle with a spirited animal and a maddened and infuriated brute.

"But," asks Dr. Martineau, "if the animal instincts and appetites are to be directed by conscience and ruled by the will in accordance with the dictates of conscience, what becomes of the unconsciousness which is necessary for their right action? Its place is gradually supplied by habit, which is the unconsciousness of a self-conscious being." The habit of plain living and spare food, so necessary to high thinking, at first acquired possibly by real effort of will, by real fasting and prayer, becomes a second nature, that sets the will free for higher conquests. The habit of purity, which at first may have resulted only from a sleepless watch of the will in directing the thoughts and imagination into safe channels, becomes an instinctive recoil from the least touch of defilement. The habit of unworldly simplicity, which may have had to be induced by deliberate self-denial, becomes a natural disposition which rejects superfluities from unconscious choice.

This is what takes place where direct conflict is necessitated by the constant readjustment of the individual, with his instincts and appetites, to his social environment which so complex a state of society as that of modern civilization involves. But under ordinary circumstances, where the teaching of Christ is observed and all the conscious energies of the man are absorbed in seeking first the kingdom of God, there the need of conflict on the lower plane is at least partially done away with. The whole current of thought and will, flowing into higher channels, is drained away from the lower instincts and appetites, which are thus restored to their natural unconsciousness, with only an occasional interference on the part of the will to subordinate them to human ends and aims, or to those demands of a high and complex civilization in the benefits of which we all share, but for whose fuller and richer life we have in some directions to pay, and perhaps at times to pay heavily. The scientific man who in his passionate devotion to the search after truth—the kingdom of God as revealed in the order of the universe—exclaimed testily that he had no time to waste in making money, had no conflict with the instinct of self-subsistence maddened into greed. It worked out a sufficient quotient of bread and cheese to insure the healthy exercise of his brain, and that was enough. The Alpine climber, intent on mastering a printless snow-peak, has not to control an appetite sharpened by mountain air from sinking into the gluttony which would be fatal to the cool head and steady foot necessary for his enterprise. The man who has a noble passion for the weak and defenceless, who from the first has cultivated a chivalrous loyalty to women, putting far from him the lowering talk, the cynical expression, the moral lassitude of society, and guarding his high enthusiasm from the blight of worldly commonplace, has no need to fight against the lower instinct that would degrade them or wrong the weak and defenceless. The conflict is there, but it is removed to a nobler and higher battle-field, a battle against the sacrifice of the weak by the strong, whilst in him the lower life may be left to settle itself, as in the unconscious birds of the air. "Love God," as St. Augustine said, "and do what you will." "Be a child of the water, and you may be a child of the wind, blowing where it listeth." "Seek the kingdom of God first, and all these things shall be added to you."

This, then, is the first great practical lesson that we learn from the study of the laws of our human nature, taken in their widest aspect, under the teaching of the Divine Master, the "open secret" of overcoming in man and woman alike, that which restores to us our whole nature, and vindicates it, even in the depths of disorder into which it has practically fallen, as originally bearing the Divine stamp. The more unconscious we are in the pursuit of physical good, the better for the ends of life; the more conscious we are in the pursuit of moral and spiritual good, the nearer we are to that kingdom of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost which we seek. Get out of the narrow individualism or atomism—for let us never forget that individual and atom are the same word—which threatens to dwarf and pulverize us, which keeps within our view only the narrow range of our own interests and defeats their true pursuit by the very intensity of attention it concentrates upon them; and live, as Goethe says, "in the beautiful, the good, and the whole," the kingdom of the Eternal. Have the higher passion that casts out the lower. The physician whose conscious aim is the relief of human suffering and the enforcement of the laws of health, even though a large professional income may be added to him; the lawyer who regards himself as the minister of the Just One to uphold the law of right and equity, whose reputation does not rest on his skill in getting off a fraudulent company without costs, and who makes his money not by his "practices," but by his honest practice; the man of science who reverently devotes himself, as the servant of the truth, to "think God's thoughts after Him," in the words of Kepler's prayer, and establish the kingdom of law and order, in the humbleness of conscious limitation which forbids dogmatizing; the artist who is true to his art and does not subordinate the laws of the eternal Loveliness to the shifting laws of the temporary market; the capitalist who looks upon himself as the steward of the public good, and to whom material gain is the means and not the end; the workman who does good work for the kingdom of God's sake, knowing that every stroke of good work is a brick in the palace of the great King, and who scorns to scamp because it pays; and, generally speaking, every man who is so intent on helping and serving others that his thoughts are taken off himself and centred on another—these are the men who are seeking first a kingdom of God, wherein dwelleth righteousness; these are the men who, living in the higher life can rule the lower—the men whose feet are in the lilies, and to whom the floods of earthly passion, even when they beat hardest, end in the flight of a dove and in a triumphal arch of light.

Now, you will see at once the intensely practical bearing of this teaching on the training of your boys. You are not called to hit down directly on the evil, to give warnings against vice, or to speak on things which your womanhood unspeakably shrinks from mentioning. What you are called to do is to secure, so far as you can, that the mind and soul moves on its own proper plane. It is more an attitude you have to form than a warning you have to give. And here it is that the imperative need of high positive teaching comes in. Till parents, and especially mothers, recognize their God-given functions as the moral teachers of their own children, till they cease to shunt off their responsibilities on the professional shoulders of the schoolmaster, we had better frankly give up the whole question in despair. Strange and sad it seems to me that at the end of the nineteenth century after the coming of our Lord I should have to plead that the moral law is possible under every condition to any man, and that parents are ipso facto the moral teachers of their own children. And yet it is the denial, tacit or explicit, of these two primary truths that has been the greatest obstacle to the progress of my work.

But I appeal to you: Who but a mother can bring such a constant and potent influence to bear as to secure the mind and character moving on its own higher plane in relation to the whole of this side of our nature? Who so well as a mother can teach the sacredness of the body as the temple of the Eternal? Who else can implant in her son that habitual reverence for womanhood which to a man is "as fountains of sweet water in the bitter sea" of life? Who like a mother, as he grows to years of sense and observation, and the curiosity is kindled, which is only a cry for light and teaching, can so answer the cry and so teach as to make the mysteries of life and truth to be for ever associated for him with all the sacred associations of home and his own mother, and not with the talk of the groom or the dirty-minded schoolboy? Who so well as a mother, as he passes into dawning manhood, can plead faithfulness to the future wife before marriage as well as after? Nay, as I hold by the old Spanish proverb "An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy," who like a mother, by her prayers and ever-present example and influence, can lead him to the Highest, and impress upon him that his life is given him for no lower end than, in the words of the Westminster Confession, "to know God and to glorify Him for ever"; and that therefore he is made on a very high plan—as Browning puts it, "Heaven's consummate cup," whose end is to slake "the Master's thirst"; and that the cup from which He drinks must be clean inside as well as out, and studded within and without with the pearl of purity?

But refuse to give him this higher teaching and training; go on, as so many mothers have done, blankly ignoring the whole subject, because it is so difficult to speak to one's boys,—as if everything worth having in this life were not difficult!—leave him to the teaching of dirty gossip, of unclean classical allusions in his school-books, of scraps of newspaper intelligence, possibly of bad companions whom he may pick up at school or business, and be sure of it, as this side of his nature is awakened—in his search after gratified curiosity or pleasurable sensation, in utter ignorance of what he is doing, through your fault, not through his—he will use his imagination and his will to strengthen the animal instincts. What ought to have been kept on a higher plane of being will be used to stimulate functions just coming into existence, and pre-eminently needing to be let alone on their own plane to mature quietly and unconsciously. Thus dwelt upon and stimulated, these functions become in a measure disordered and a source of miserable temptation and difficulty, even if no actual wrong-doing results. If you only knew what those struggles are, if you only knew what miserable chains are forged in utter helpless ignorance, you would not let any sense of difficulty or shrinking timidity make you refuse to give your boy the higher teaching which would have saved him.

It is told of the beautiful Countess of Dufferin, by her son and biographer, Lord Dufferin, that when the surgeons were consulting round her bedside which they should save—the mother or the child—she exclaimed, "Oh, never mind me; save my baby!" If you knew the facts as I know them, I am quite sure you would exclaim, in the face of any difficulties, any natural shrinking on your part, "Oh, never mind me, let me save my boys!"

FOOTNOTES:

[ [5] The Study of Sociology, by Herbert Spencer (International Scientific Series), p. 270, fifth edition, 1876.

[ [6] I quote here at some length from a White Cross paper called Per Augusta ad Augusta, in which I summarized and applied Dr. Martineau's teaching, as I do not think I can do it more clearly or in more condensed form. By some mistake it came out, not under my name, but under the initials of the writer of True Manliness and several others of the White Cross Series. I only mention the mistake now to safeguard my own intellectual honesty.

[ [7] Hours of Thought, by Dr. Martineau, vol. i., p. 35, third edition.

CHAPTER V

EARLY BOYHOOD

Having now laid down the general principles which we have to recognize in the moral training of the young, let me endeavor to make some practical suggestions how these principles may be carried out, suggestions which, as a matter of fact, I have found to be helpful to educated mothers in the great and responsible task of training the men of the future generation.

All I would earnestly ask you to remember is, that in offering these suggestions I am in no way venturing to dictate to you, only endeavoring to place a wide experience at your service. Doubtless you will often modify and, in some cases, very possibly reverse my conclusions. All I ask is that you should weigh them thoughtfully and prayerfully and with an open and unprejudiced mind before you finally reject them.

Let us, therefore, begin with the nursery. It is in the nursery that the roots of the evil we have to contend with are often first planted, and this in more senses than one. In the more obvious sense all experienced mothers know what I mean. But I am quite sure that there are a large number of young wives who become mothers without the smallest knowledge of the dangers to which even infant boys may be exposed. This ignorance is painfully shown by the frequent application for nursemaids from our penitentiaries. At one house where I held a small meeting my young hostess, an intelligent literary woman, came into my room after the household had retired to rest to ask me about some curious actions which she had noticed in her baby boy at night. There could not be a doubt or a question that her nurse was corrupting her little child before that hapless young mother's eyes, and forming in him habits which could only lead to misery hereafter, and only too possibly to idiocy and death; and that young mother was too ignorant to save her own baby boy! Indeed, I know of no greater instance of the cruelty of "the conspiracy of silence" than the fact that in all the orthodox medical manuals for young mothers the necessary knowledge is withheld.[8] But more marvellous still is the fact that women should ever have placidly consented to an ignorance which makes it impossible for them to save even baby boys from a corrupt nursemaid, who by some evil chance may have found her way into their service through a false character or under some other specious disguise, not seeing at once that the so-called delicacy which shrinks from knowing everything that is necessary in order to save is not purity but prurience.

I would, therefore, beseech young mothers who are conscious of their own ignorance to see a lady doctor, if they do not like to consult their own family physician, and ask her to tell them plainly what they have to guard against and the best methods to pursue. All I can say here is to beseech every mother to be absolutely careful about the antecedents of her nursemaids, and only to admit those of unblemished character into the precincts of the nursery. Never, if possible, let your baby boy sleep with any one but yourself, if through illness or any other cause he cannot sleep in his own little cot. Pyjamas, I think, are generally recognized now to be the best form of night gear, as keeping the little limbs warm and covered, when in the restlessness of sleep the child throws off the bedclothes, as well as for other and more vital reasons. If through straitened means you cannot afford an experienced nurse—not that I should altogether allow that even the experienced nurse is to be implicitly and blindly trusted until she has been well tested—then I would entreat you not to let sleepiness or ill health or any other excuse prevent you from being always present at your boy's morning bath. Often and often evil habits arise from imperfect washing and consequent irritation; and many a wise mother thinks it best on this account to revert to the old Jewish rite of initiation by which cleanliness was secured. Teach them from the first self-reverence in touch, as in word and deed, and watch even their attitudes in sleep, that the little arms are folded lightly upwards. Even experienced nurses are not always nice in their ways. Be vigilantly watchful that the utmost niceness is observed between the boys and girls in the nursery, and that childish modesty is never broken down, but, on the contrary, nurtured and trained. Knowledge and watchfulness are the two cherubim with the flaming sword turning all ways to guard the young tree of life and bar the way of every low and creeping thing. If I may venture in some sort to reverse our Lord's words, I should say His word to all mothers is, "What I say unto all I say especially unto you, Watch."

But there is another and a deeper sense in which the root of the evil is first planted and nourished in the nursery. If we are to contend with this deadly peril to soul and body, I cannot but feel that we must bring about a radical change in the training of our boys. There must be some radical defect in that training for men to take the attitude they do. I do not mean bad, dissipated men, but men who in all other relations of life would be designated fairly good men. Once let such a man be persuaded—however wrongly—that his health, or his prospect of having some day a family of his own, will suffer from delayed marriage and he considers the question settled. He will sacrifice his health to over-smoking, to excess in athletics, to over-eating or champagne drinking, to late hours and overwork; but to sacrifice health or future happiness to save a woman from degradation, bah! it never so much as enters his mind. Even so high-minded a writer as Mr. Lecky, in his History of European Morals,[9] deliberately proposes that the difficulty of deferred marriage which advanced civilization necessitates, at least for the upper classes, should be met by temporary unions being permitted with a woman of a lower class. The daughters of workingmen, according to this writer, are good enough as fleshly stop-gaps, to be flung aside when a sufficient income makes the true wife possible—an honorable proceeding indeed! to say nothing of the children of such a temporary union, to whom the father can perform no duty, and leave no inheritance, save the inestimable one of a mother with a tainted name. Verily there must be some fault in our training of men! Certainly an intelligent American mother put her finger on the blot, so far as we are concerned, when, speaking to me many years ago, she said what struck her so in our English homes was the way in which the girls were subordinated to the boys; the boys seemed first considered, the girls in comparison were nowhere. Doubtless our English homes are more at fault here than in America; but, as a mother's pride in her boys is the same all over the world, may not even American homes admit of a little improvement in this respect as well? And, if we choose to bring up our boys to look upon their mothers and sisters as more or less the devoted slaves of their selfishness, can we wonder that they should grow up to look upon all women as more or less the slaves of their needs, fleshly or otherwise?

Now, what I want all boys taught from their earliest years is, roughly speaking, that boys came into the world to take care of girls. Whatever modification may take place in our view of the relation of the sexes, Nature's great fact will remain, that the man is the stronger—a difference which civilization and culture seem to strengthen rather than diminish; and from his earliest years he ought to be taught that he, therefore, is the one that has to serve. It is the strong that have to bear the burden of the weaker, and not to prostitute that strength by using it to master the weaker into bearing their loads. It is the man who has to give himself for the woman, not the other way on, as we have made it. Nay, this is no theory of mine; it is a truth implanted in the very heart of every true man. "Every true man," as Milton says, "is born a knight," diligently as we endeavor to stub up this royal root, constantly, as from the very nursery, we endeavor to train it out of him. You may deny the truth and go on some theory of your own in the training of your boys, but the truth cannot deny itself. It is there, whether you will have it or not, a root of the tree of life itself.

Now there is not a day that need pass without opportunities of training your boys in this their true knightly attitude. You can see, as I have already said, that they learn in relation to their own sisters what in after years they have to practise towards all women alike. To give up the comfortable easy-chair, the favorite book or toy, the warmest place by the fire, to the little sister—this ought to become a second nature to a well-trained boy. To carry a parcel for her, to jump up and fetch anything she wants, to give in to her because he is a boy and the stronger—all this ought to be a matter of course. As he grows older you can place him in little positions of responsibility to his sisters, sending them out on an expedition or to a party under his care. In a thousand such ways you can see that your boy is not only born but grows up a knight. I was once in a house where the master always brought up the heavy evening water-cans and morning coal-scuttles for the maids. And if these were placed at the foot of the stairs so as to involve no running in and out of the kitchen, it might be no mean exercise for a boy's muscles.

I was told only the other day of a little six-year-old boy whose mother had brought him up from babyhood on these principles. He was playing with his little sister on a bed, when suddenly he perceived that she was getting perilously near the edge which was farthest from the wall. Instantly he dismounted and went round to the other side, and, climbing up, pushed her gently into the middle of the bed, remarking sententiously to himself, "I think boys ought always to take the dangerous side of their sisters." Ah me! if only you mothers would but train your boys to "take the dangerous side of their sisters," especially of those poor little sisters who are thrust forth at so early an age to earn their own living, alone and unprotected, on the perilous highways of the world, skirted for them by so terrible a precipice, what a different world would it be for us women, what a purer and better world for your sons!

Surely the womanhood in our homes ought to enable us to bring up our boys in such an habitual attitude of serving a woman, of caring for her, of giving himself for her, that it would become a moral impossibility for him ever to lower or degrade a woman in his after-life.

In concluding these suggestions there is one point I must emphasize, the more so as in treating of one particular moral problem it is difficult not to seem to ignore a truth which is simply vital to all moral training. Let us clearly recognize that there is no such thing as moral specialism. Our moral being, like Wordsworth's cloud, "moveth altogether if it move at all." You cannot strengthen one particular virtue except by strengthening the character all round. Cardinal Newman points out—I think in one of those wonderful Oxford sermons of his—that what our ancestors would have called "a bosom sin" will often take an underground course and come to the surface at quite an unexpected point in the character. Hidden licentiousness, which one would expect to evince itself in over-ripe sentiment and feeling, manifests itself instead in cruelty and hardness of heart. The little habit of self-indulgence which you in your foolish fondness have allowed in that boy of yours may, in after-life, come out as the very impurity which you have endeavored so earnestly to guard him against. This mystical interdependence and hidden correlation of our moral and intellectual being is a solemn thought, and can only be met by recognizing that the walls of the citadel must be strengthened at all points in order to resist the foe at one. Truthfulness, conscientiousness that refuses to scamp work, devotion to duty, temperance in food and drink, rectitude—these things are the bastions of purity of life, as well as of all high character.

But in these days I think we have more especially to remember that the Beautiful Gate of all noble living rests, like the gate of the Jewish Temple, on two pillars, both of which show signs of being considerably out of repair. One of these pillars is obedience, or discipline. If you have not exacted prompt and unhesitating obedience in your boy, from his earliest childhood, to the parents whom he has seen, do you think that in after years he will obey the Father of Lights, whom he has not seen? Do you think, if you have let him set your authority at defiance, he will in future years, with temptation on one side and opportunity on the other, bow to the invisible authority of conscience? What is it, I ask, that makes the army the finest school for character, giving us our Lawrences, our Havelocks, our Gordons, our Kitcheners, but simply this habit of implicit obedience, of that discipline which has grown so grievously lax in so many of our English homes? In Carlyle's strong words, "Obedience is our universal duty and destiny, wherein whoso will not bend must break: too early and too thoroughly we cannot be trained to know that 'would,' in this world of ours, is as mere zero to 'should,' and for most part as the smallest of fractions even to 'shall.'"[10]

The second great pillar of the portal of noble life seems to me to show still greater signs of being out of repair and in want of restoration, and that pillar is reverence,—that heaven-eyed quality which Dr. Martineau rightly places at the very top of the ethical scale. Let that crumble, and the character which might have been a temple sinks into a mere counting-house. When in these days children are allowed to call their father Dick, Jack, or Tom, and nickname their own mother; when they are allowed to drown the voice of the most honored guest at the table with their little bald chatter, so that even the cross-questioning genius of a Socrates would find itself at a discount; when they are allowed to criticise and contradict their elders in a way that would have appalled our grandmothers; when they are suffered to make remarks which are anything but reverent on sacred things—have I not some reason to fear that the one attribute which touches the character to fine issues is threatened with extinction? Do you think that the boy who has never been taught to reverence his own mother's womanhood will reverence the degraded womanhood of our streets, or hear that Divine Voice guarding all suffering manhood and all helpless womanhood from wrong at his hands, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto Me?"

Oh, I would entreat you to set yourself firmly against this evil tendency of our day, to which I cannot but believe so much of its agnosticism is due,—that deadening down and stamping out of the spiritual instincts of our nature, those great intuitions of the soul, which lie both above and below all reasoning and logic and form their basis rather than their apex. Once let the springs of reverence be choked up, once let that window of the soul be overgrown with weeds and cobwebs, and your most careful training will only produce a character estimable in many respects, but for the most part without noble aspirations, without high ideals, with no great enthusiasms—a character, to use Saint Beuve's expressive phrase, "tout en façade sur la rue," whose moral judgments are no better than street cries; the type of man that accepts the degradation of women with blank alacrity as a necessity of civilization, and would have it regulated, like any other commodity for the market; that very common type of character which, whatever its good qualities, spreads an atmosphere of blight around it, stunting all upward growing things and flattening down our life to the dead level of desert sands.

If you would not be satisfied at your boy rising no higher than this, then, again I say, guard the springs of reverence. Do not let your pride in your child's smartness or any momentary sense of humor make you pass over any little speech that savors of irreverence; check it instantly. Exact respect for yourself and for the boy's father, the respect which is no enemy, but the reverse, to the uttermost of fondness. Insist upon good manners and respectful attention to the guests of your house. Do not despise the good old fashion of family prayers because they do not rise to all that we might wish them to be. At least they form a daily recognition of "Him in whom the families of the earth are blessed"—a daily recognition which that keen observer of English life, the late American Ambassador, Mr. Bayard, pointed out as one of the great secrets of England's greatness, and which forms a valuable school for habits of reverence and discipline for the children of the family. Insist upon the boys being down in time for the worship of God, and do not allow them to get into the habit indulged in by so many young men of "sloping" down with slippered feet long after breakfast is done and prayers are over.

Only let the springs of reverence well up in your child's soul, and then, and then only, will you be able to give your boy what, after all, must always be the greatest safeguard from shipwreck in this perilous world—religious faith, that stops him at the very threshold of temptation with the words: "How can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?" Your very attitude as you kneel by his side with bowed head and folded hands while he says his little evening and morning prayer will breathe into his soul a sense of a Divine Presence about our bed and about our path. Your love—so strong to love, and yet so weak to save—can lead his faltering childish feet to that Love which is deeper than our deepest fall, "which knows all, but loves us better than it knows." You can press your child against the very heart of God, and lay him in the Everlasting Arms, that faint not, neither are weary; and, with the mother of St. Augustine, you may know that the child of such prayers and such tears will never perish.

"Happy he
With such a mother! faith in womankind
Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high
Comes easy to him, and though he trip and fall
He shall not blind his soul with clay."

FOOTNOTES:

[ [8] This is the case with our recognized medical manuals; I do not know whether it is equally true of American manuals.

[ [9] Vol. ii. See chapter on "The Position of Women."

[ [10] Sartor Resartus, by Thomas Carlyle, Book II., chap, ii., p. 68. Chapman and Hall, 1831.

CHAPTER VI

BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL LIFE

I now come to what must always be the great moral crux in a boy's life, that on which all the higher issues of his character will, in all human probability, turn—his school life. One of our great educators took what, looked at superficially, seemed the somewhat retrograde step of giving up the mastership of a college at Oxford to take again the head-mastership of a great public school. But in a conversation I had with him he led me to infer that he had done so from the conviction forced upon him that the whole moral trend of the character must be given, if given at all, prior to university life, at the public school; and to him nothing less than the formation of high moral character seemed worth striving for. Fine scholarship and high mathematics are excellent, but after all, as the apostle of culture, Matthew Arnold, has told us, conduct, and not intellectual attainment, forms seven-tenths of life.

Now, it is in connection with your boy's school life that you will have your greatest dangers to face, your hardest battle to fight.

I am, of course, aware that your school system is in some respects different from ours. You have the mixed day school such as largely obtains in Scotland, but which does not exist, at least for the upper classes, in England. You have private boarding-schools, which with us are called preparatory schools, as they form the vestibule to the public school. And you have, lastly, a few large public schools somewhat on the model of Eton and Harrow.

Let us begin with the boarding-school. I do not intend for one moment to deny the advantages of our great English public schools. They are excellent for discipline and the formation of strong character, especially for a ruling race like ours; and their very numerical strength and importance command a splendid set of men as masters. But both public and private boarding-schools labor under one great disadvantage: they remove a boy from all family influence and violate the order of our life, which can never be violated with impunity. Boys and girls are sent into the world in pretty equal proportions, and we were never intended to pile a lot of boys together without girls and largely without any feminine influence whatever. To do so is to insure moral disorder whether in our schools or yours. To quote from an excellent paper of Dr. Butler's: "In giving us sisters," says one of the Hares in Guesses at Truth, "God gave us the best moral antiseptic," and it is their absence more than anything else that has produced the moral problems which our boarding-schools present. To be absent from sisters for the greater part of the year, at an age when their companionship is perhaps the most eloquent of silent appeals to purity, is undoubtedly one of the greatest evils to be set against the blessings of our public schools.[11]

For my own part, I can only say that the one thing which has filled me at times with the darkness of despair has not been the facts about our 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 unexposed to the last.

Speaking of those commoner forms of impurity to which I have referred, and which are so mischievous as stimulating immature functions, needing, as Acton over and over again insists, absolute quiet and rest for healthy development, Dr. Dukes, the head physician of one of our best known public schools, states: "The reason why it is so widespread an evil"—computed in 1886 at eighty per cent. of boys at school, a computation accepted by a committee of public schoolmasters—"I believe to be, that the boy leaves home in the first instance without one word of warning from his parents that he will meet with bad boys who will tell him that everybody does it, and thus he falls into evil ways from his innocence and ignorance alone."[12]

Dr. Dukes further states that as the results of his thirty years' experience he had come to the conclusion that only one per cent. of parents ever warned their boys at all before sending them to school.

These statements were made some fifteen years ago, when first the conspiracy of silence was broken through and the question of the morality of our public and private schools was dragged into the light of day and boldly faced and grappled with, largely owing to the action of Dr. Pusey. Since then a mass of strenuous effort has been directed against the evil by our high-minded head-masters; and an immense improvement has been effected. It is too short a time for one to hope that the evil has been eradicated; but when parents learn to fulfil their moral duties of teaching and warning their own boys—as Dr. Dukes observes—I feel sure it could be so far removed as to cause the numbers to change places, so that we might obtain a percentage of ninety to ninety-five of those who lead pure lives while at school, as against five per cent, who are impure, reversing the lamentable ratio that now exists. But here again there has been progress, and I feel sure that the percentage of parents who do warn and teach their sons before sending them to school is now incomparably higher than Dr. Dukes's "one per cent." and is steadily rising.

As to other deeper and nameless evils, they have been already reduced to a minimum, and if fathers could only be persuaded to do their duty by their own boys, they might be made wholly to disappear.

I give you these facts about our English schools, that parents may see for themselves what are the consequences of refusing both teaching and warning to their boys, under the delusion that God's lilies will grow up in the weedy garden of the human heart without strenuous culture and training.

Do not, therefore, I beseech you, take for granted that your boarding-schools are entirely free from such evils. You have the same conditions that we have. Till lately your boys have been as untaught and unwarned as ours. In your boarding-schools, as in ours, they are removed from the purifying influence of mother and sisters. They are just at the age which has neither the delicacy of childhood nor of early manhood. Rest assured that conditions will breed like results.

"My belief, not lightly formed," says Dr. Butler,[13] "is, that none of the great schools can congratulate themselves on anything like safety from this danger. And if this is true of the great public schools, it is still more true of private schools, where the evil is admittedly greater. Boys and masters alike may strangely deceive themselves; the evil may hide very close. Many a boy has been known to assert positively and honestly that nothing of the kind was ever heard of in his time, and that any fellow suspected of it would have been cut, and half killed, when all the time the evil was actively at work even among the circle of his intimate friends."

And yet it is this evil, so pervasive in its influence, so certain to taint the fresh springs of young life with impure knowledge, if not to foul them with unclean acts, that parents still too often elect to ignore. The boy, full of eager curiosity, anxious, above all things, to catch up the ways of the other fellows, afraid, above all things, of being laughed at for his innocence, and elated at being taken up by one of the swells in the shape of an elder boy, and at first set-off wholly ignorant of the motive; exposed to suggestions about the functions of his own body which he has not the knowledge to rebut as the devil's lies—what wonder is it that so many boys, originally good and pure, fall victims? "They blunder like blind puppies into sin," a medical man who has had much to do with boys' schools exclaimed to me in the bitterness of his soul. The small house of the young boy's soul, full of the song of birds, the fresh babble of the voices of sisters, all the innocent sights and sounds of an English or American home, swept and garnished till now by such loving hands, but left empty, unguarded, and unwatched, for the unclean spirit to lift the latch and enter in and take possession—the pity of it! oh, the pity of it! What can the boy think? To quote Dr. Dukes again:

"He will say to himself: 'My father knows of all this vice at schools, and yet has not said one word to me about it. He has warned me about most things. He told me to be truthful, to keep my temper, to be upright and manly, to say my prayers; he pressed me never to get into debt, never to drink, and never to use bad language; and he told me I ought to change my boots and clothes when wet, so as not to get ill; and yet he has not said one syllable about this. My father is a good man and loves me, and if he wanted me not to do this he would surely have told me; it can't be very wrong, else I am sure he would have protected me and told me all about it."

I remember a friend of mine, who had been greatly stirred on the whole subject, endeavoring, with tears in her eyes, to persuade a father to warn his boy before sending him to his first public school, and on his absolutely refusing to do any such thing, she said to him, "At least promise me that you will give him this book," placing in his hands Mr. George Everett's excellent little book, Your Innings. This he consented to do. The next morning my friend met him at breakfast, the boy having been already despatched by an early train. "Well," he said, "I sat up till past twelve last night reading your book; it is excellent, and I gave it to my lad before starting him off. But there is just one chapter in it, called a 'Strange Companion,' which I took the precaution of previously cutting out with my penknife; and my boy in his after years will thank me for not putting any such ideas in his head, but having kept him the pure and innocent lad that he is." I need not say that it was the one chapter that would have put the boy on his guard. Oh, befooled and purblind father! I happened to know that the school to which the boy was sent was swept at that time by a moral epidemic, and before that hapless lad had been a week in its corrupt atmosphere he would have had ideas put into his head with a vengeance. His father had handed over the ground of his boy's heart for the devil to sow the first crop, and as a rule the devil sows, not wild oats, as we say, but acorns—a dread sowing which it may take years to root up and to extirpate, even if, so far as after-taint is concerned, it can ever be wholly extirpated.

In another case a widowed mother came to one of my meetings, and was profoundly alarmed at what I said about the dangers of our schoolboys. It had never occurred to her that her gentlemanly little lad of twelve could have any temptations of the kind. Unlike the father I have mentioned, she resolved to speak to him that same evening. She found that he was fighting a battle against the whole school, standing up alone for the right, guided by some blind instinct of purity to resist the foul suggestions which were inflicted upon him, threatening him with the most terrible consequences in after-life if he did not yield and do as the other boys did. Think of it, ye mothers! a child of twelve without a hand to guide him, without a voice to cheer him, refused the knowledge that would have saved him from his deadly peril, his own mother deaf and dumb and blind to his struggles, leaving him to fight his little forlorn hope absolutely alone. I need scarcely say how thankfully he poured forth his sore heart to his mother when once she had opened the door, till now kept locked by her own ignorance; and how she was able to explain to him that, far from reaping any evil consequences from doing what is right, like Sir Galahad, "his strength would be the strength of ten" if he kept himself pure. She probably took steps to remove him from so corrupt an atmosphere as prevailed in that preparatory school, but of this I do not know.

But here let me guard myself from being misunderstood. I am not making out that every schoolboy is exposed to these temptations; there are boys so exceptionally endowed that they seem to spread a pure atmosphere around them which is respected by even the coarsest and loosest boys in the school. All I do maintain, with Dr. Butler, is that no school is safe from this danger, that at any time it may prove an active one in your boy's life, and that at the very least you have to guard him from impure knowledge being thrust upon him before nature has developed the instincts of manhood by which she guards her inner shrine.

And now I come to the question of day schools. As I have already said, I cannot feel but they are more consonant with the order of our life as giving the discipline and competition of numbers without removing the boy from family life, nor do they lend themselves to some of the graver evils of our boarding-schools. But, alas! in themselves they form no panacea for the evils we are contemplating. On the contrary, I am told on authority I cannot question that in some places this plague spot is rife among them. In one case the evil had struck so wide and deep that the school had to be temporarily closed. Here, again, the same lesson is emphasized, viz.: that whatever is the form of the school, however excellent the teacher, there is no substitute in the moral life for the home teaching and training of mothers and fathers.

No mother can read these statements unmoved—statements, remember, not my own, but made by men of the deepest and widest experience, and which, therefore, you are bound to weigh, ponder, and carefully consider. I know that straight from your heart again comes the cry, "What can I do?"

I am inclined to answer this cry in one word, "Everything,"—with God's help.

I

And now let us enter into practical details. We will begin with the outworks, and work our way inwards to the shrine.

First, as to the all-important choice of a school, should the boy's father decide, for reasons in which you concur to send him to a boarding-school.

As to how to ascertain the real state of a school there is, of course, considerable difficulty. I have always found the best way is through mothers who have gained the confidence of their boys and who know through them what really goes on. In this way, as mothers wake up to the danger their boys run and to their own responsibility in guarding them, we shall be able to help one another more and more. But make a point of yourself, as well as the boy's father, personally seeing the master to whom you think of entrusting your lad, and talking over the matter with him. In this way you will not only satisfy yourself, but you will strengthen his hands by making him feel how vital the whole question is to your heart. What more than anything else weakens the high-minded men who have the tuition of the young is the utter unconcern that is evinced by the parents and the sense that, by the payment of a sum of money down, they can compound with a master for the performance of their inalienable duty of undertaking the moral education of their own children.

Here let me give you two most earnest cautions. Do not attach too much importance to mere mechanical arrangements as moral safeguards. One of our most successful head-masters says:

"I would most seriously warn any parent anxious about the choice of a school not to attach much weight to the apparent excellence of arrangements. Some of the worst schools have these arrangements in the highest perfection. They cannot afford to have them otherwise. Neat cubicles and spotless dimity have beguiled an uninterrupted sequence of mammas, and have kept alive, and even flourishing, schools which are in a thoroughly bad moral state and are hopelessly inefficient in every particular. Of course, many a parent feels that he ought to judge for himself, and these mechanical arrangements are too often the only material on which he can form his judgment. Let me assure him that they are entirely untrustworthy."

Secondly, do not think to find safety in the choice of a so-called "religious" school, even though it reflect the exact shade of your own religious opinions. The worst evils I ever knew went on in a school where the boys implicated held a weekly prayer-meeting! We must boldly face the fact that there is some mysterious connection between the religious emotions and the lower animal nature; and the religious forcing-house, of whatever school of theology, will always be liable to prove a hot-bed of impurity. Choose a school with a high moral tone, with religion as an underlying principle—a practical religion, that inculcates duty rather than fosters emotion, and embodies the wise proverb of Solomon, "In all labor there is profit, but the talk of the lips tendeth to penury."

Only let me beseech you to use your whole influence not to have your boy sent away at too early an age. Do you really think that the exclusive society of little boys, with their childish chatter, their foolish little codes, their crude and often ridiculously false notions of life, and their small curiosities, naturally inquisitive, but not always clean in the researches they inspire, and always false in their results, is morally better for your child than, in Dr. Butler's words,

"the refining and purifying atmosphere of home, with the tenderness of a mother, the grace and playfulness of sisters, the love and loyalty of the family nurse, and lastly—scarcely to be distinguished in its effects from these influences—the sweetness, the simplicity, the flower-picking, the pony-patting of happy, frolicsome younger brothers or sisters in the garden, the paddock, or stable?"

If the boy has got out of hand, I ask, Whose fault is that? and is it fair to the child that your fault should be remedied by sending him away from all that is best and most purifying in child life? I would plead earnestly that eleven or twelve is old enough for the private school, and that a boy should not be sent to a public school before fourteen. In this I think most of our English head-masters would agree with me. Till this age, a day school or a tutor should be had recourse to, and when the time comes for sending him off to school, at least we can refuse to place the boy anywhere, either at a private or public school, where there is not some woman to mother and look after the boys and exert a good womanly influence over them. A head-master keenly alive to moral dangers, with a capable wife ready to use her womanly influence in aiding and abetting his efforts, I have found the best possible combination.

But if it is decided that the boys are to be brought up at the day school, your range of choice will probably be very small. You will have to look wholly to your home influence and teaching to counteract any evil influence they may encounter in their school life. But as your boys will never be separated from you, what may not that home influence and teaching, with knowledge and forewarning to direct it,—what may it not accomplish?

II

Let us, then, think out the best ways in which you can warn and guard your boy and fulfil your responsibility of being his moral teacher.

Let us begin with the simplest measure which you can take, and which can present no difficulty to anyone. Before sending your boy to school get him quietly by himself and say to him some such words as these: "My boy, you know, or will come to know, that when boys get together they often talk of nasty things, and even do nasty things. Give me your word of honor as a Christian and a gentleman that you will never say or do anything that you know you would be ashamed to tell me, that you know would bring a blush to your sister's cheeks. Always remember that dirty talk, and still more dirty deeds, are only fit for cads. Promise me faithfully that you will never let any boy, especially an elder boy, tell you 'secrets.' If you were to consent through curiosity, or because you feel flattered at one of the elder fellows taking you up, be sure he means you no good. Whatever you want to know ask me, and so far as I can I will tell you." Some such words as these said solemnly to a boy the day before he leaves home for the first time, either for a boarding-school, or even a day school, will make your womanhood a sort of external conscience to your boy, to guard him from those first beginnings of impurity, in the shape of what are technically called "secrets," which lead on to all the rest. I know one mother who, from her boy's earliest years, has made a solemn pact with him, on the one hand, if he would promise never to ask any questions about life and birth of anyone but her, she, in her turn, would promise to tell him all he wanted to know; and from first to last there has been that perfect confidence and friendship between mother and son which is, and ever must be, a boy's greatest safeguard.

Only remember that with young boys men who have had the greatest experience are generally agreed that it is better not to put the stress on religious motives. Practically, for a young boy, it is better to treat the whole thing as dirty, nasty, and blackguardly. And the whole subject must always be spoken of with reserve, without any emotion, and with much "dry light."

With most lads I should go a step further; I should give the boy one of the White Cross papers, "A Strange Companion."[14] It is impossible to lay down hard and fast rules; it is impossible to make so many jam-pots of even young humanity, to be tied up and labelled and arranged upon the same shelf. Each individuality has to be dealt with in all its mysterious idiosyncrasy. One boy may be so reserved that it is better to write to him than to talk face to face; another may find the greatest possible strength and comfort in freedom of speech and the feeling that there is no barrier between him and his mother with regard to being able to tell her freely of any temptations that may assail him. Your mother's instincts will be your best guide as to what method to adopt with each of your boys.

If the father of the lad can be induced, at any rate before he enters a boarding-school, to follow the advice of that remarkable man, Mr. Thring, the founder of Uppingham School, in his address to our Church Congress, and write a letter of plain warning and counsel to the lad, it would be an unspeakable help. "My first statement," says Mr. Thring, "is that all fathers ought to write such a letter to their sons. It is not difficult, if done in a common-sense way."[15]

But now I come to what on all hands we must allow to be a point of extreme difficulty. I think all head-masters, deeply concerned in the moral welfare of the boys under their charge, would emphatically endorse the following words of Dr. Butler's:

"It is certain, it must needs be, that boys should, at an early period of their boyhood, come to hear of the nature of sexual relations. From whom should they first learn it? Should it be with every accompaniment of coarseness, of levity, of obscenity? From some ribald groom in the stables? From some impure maidservant who has stolen into the household and the nursery? From some brother only a year or two older, who has just received his first initiation in impurity at a private school and is too young to understand its danger? Worst of all, from the idlest, and most corrupt, and most worthless set of boys at this same private school, who surround the newcomer within a few days, perhaps a few hours, of his first joining, and, with knowing looks and enticing words, try to probe his childish knowledge, and leave him half-ashamed of himself and keenly inquisitive for full initiation, if he finds that he knows nothing of this engrossing mystery? Is it right, is it fair, is it consistent with religious duty or with common-sense, that a little boy of eight, or ten, or twelve, should be sent at this impressionable age to hear for the first time of facts of human nature which must ere long be known, and are part of God's appointment? Does not every dictate of humanity and of reason point to the conclusion that the dawn of this knowledge should be invested with all that is tender, and loving, and pure, and sacred, instead of being shrouded in the mists of innuendo or blazoned forth in the shamelessness of bestiality? There is really no answer but one to such a question, and the plain truth is that fathers, perhaps still more mothers, must recognize the duty which lies upon them to teach their children, at such times, in such words, and with such reservations as the character of each child may suggest, the elements at least of that knowledge which will otherwise be learnt but a very little later from a widely different set of instructors. I lay down the principle as admitting of no exception—I do not anticipate even one dissentient voice from any who now hear me—that no boy ought ever to be allowed to go to school without learning from his father or his mother, or from some brother or tried friend considerably older than himself the simple facts as to the laws of birth and the terrible danger of ever coming to talk of these phenomena as matters of frivolous and filthy conversation."

I can only beseech you to give due weight to these words of one who had many years' experience of a large public school. Over and over again, at all my meetings of educated mothers, I have reiterated his question in similar words, "Is it right, is it fair, that your boy should learn the sacred mysteries of life and birth from the sources which Dr. Butler enumerates, and to which you abandon him, if you refuse to speak; sources of unclean and lying information by which I have no hesitation in saying that the mind and conscience of many men are more or less permanently defiled, even when the life has been kept outwardly pure?" Can you hesitate for one moment to allow that the springs of the life which you will be the first to acknowledge comes from God should well up from a pure source, till, like Wordsworth's stream—

and that the whole subject should be so bound up in the boy's mind with his father's love for his mother, his mother's love for his father, with his own existence, and that of his sisters, that he would shrink with utter loathing from the filthy so-called "secrets" that are bandied about among schoolboys? I know that the task of conveying this knowledge presents many difficulties, but again I ask, "What is there in our life that is worth doing which is not difficult?" Long ago the definition of a difficulty to me has become "a thing to be overcome." It is not in sitting down helplessly before a difficulty that the way will open. With us, as with the Israelites on the brink of that raging midnight sea, it is in a brave obedience to the Divine command, "Go forward!" that the path opens through the trackless sea, and we find that the great waters that seem ready to overwhelm us are in reality a baptism into new life.

III

Again I seem almost to hear the cry of your heart, "I know I ought to speak to my boy, but how am I to do it?"

Now, it is here that I earnestly desire to give you, if I possibly can, some helpful, practical suggestions, for I feel that it is not in the recognition of a duty, but in its performance, that the difficulty lies which is arresting so many educated mothers at the present time.

With very young children, whether girls or boys, there should be no difficulty whatever. They are too young to understand. Only, when they come to you asking their innocent little questions as to where the little baby brother or sister comes from, I would earnestly ask you never to allow yourself, or your nurse, to inflict on them the usual popular fables, that the baby was brought by the doctor or that it was found under the gooseberry-bush. A child is far quicker than we think to detect that mother is hiding something, and the first tiny seed of evil curiosity is sown. Make no mystery about it; look your child full in the face, and say, "My child, you have asked me a question about what is very, very sacred. If I were to try to explain it to you, you would not be old enough to understand; for the present you must be content to know that the baby comes from God; how it comes mother will tell you when you grow old enough to understand; only promise me that you will never ask any one but mother about it." The child will then see that you are hiding nothing, and will be satisfied to wait for the explanation that mother has promised.

But what when the child is old enough to understand?—an age which doubtless varies in different children, but which with boys must come before their first school, if you are to occupy the ground of his heart with good seed, which leaves no room for the devil's sowing.

Well, with regard to the facts of birth, I do not think we ought to find much difficulty. You can point out how the baby seed has a soft, downy place provided for it in the pod of the parent plant till it has ripened and is fit to be sown, when the pod opens and lets it fall to the earth, and it becomes a plant in its turn. You can point out that the egg in a similar way is carried in the mother bird's body till the shell has hardened and is fit to be laid, when she warms it with her own breast, patiently sitting on it for days, while the father bird feeds her, till the little chick is strong enough to break the walls of its tiny house, and come forth and peck and fend for itself. You can explain how the little kitten the child plays with has in the same way a safe place provided for it in the mother's body, where it grows and grows till all its organs are formed, and it can breathe and suck, when, like the seed from the pod, and the chick from the egg it leaves the mother's body, and is born, a blind and helpless baby kitten, to be fed and tenderly cared for by the mother cat. You will explain that the baby comes in just the same way so far as its infant body is concerned, growing like the kitten from a tiny cell—borne by the mother till all the organs are formed which it needs for its earthly life, when it also is born and laid in its mother's arms, to be nourished and cared for by the love of both father and mother, not for a few weeks, as with animals, but through long years of helplessness. And you mean to tell me that the sacred truth would not endear you to your child far more than the usual cock-and-bull story about the doctor and the gooseberry-bush?

A friend of mine has three boys of widely opposite character and temperament. Owing to circumstances, the eldest lad had to be sent to school at an early age. Young as he was, she resolved to follow Dr. Butler's advice and tell him the facts of birth in the way I have suggested. On realizing the truth, the boy flung his arms round her neck and burst into tears. But though she felt that she had done right, she was not wholly without misgivings that she might have introduced some objectionable talk into her nursery. When the time came to send the second lad to school, she repeated the talk that she had had with his elder brother. But to her surprise she found him in total ignorance of the facts: his elder brother had never confided them to him. And so again with the third boy. Evidently the boys had considered it too sacred a thing to talk about—how much too sacred, then, to allow of their joining in with the unclean gossip of schoolboys! Its only result was to give them an added tenderness for their mother, and to make them resent all such unclean talk as so much mud flung at her.

So far, so good. But we all of us realize that it is not the facts of birth, but the facts of the origination of life, that form the perennial source of obscene talk, and often of obscene action, among boys; and it is in explaining these, without violating those instincts of reserve and modesty with which nature herself surrounds the whole subject, that what often seems an insuperable difficulty arises. Yet these functions are, and must be, the very shrine of a body which is a temple of the Lord and Giver of life; and on the face of things, therefore, there must be some method of conveying pure knowledge to the opening mind with regard to them. The difficulty must be with ourselves, and not in the very nature of things themselves.

Has it not been created in a great measure by a wrong method? We begin with human life instead of ending with it; we isolate it from a great system to which it belongs, and treat what is "the roof and crown of things" as a roof that tops no fair edifice, and is therefore anomalous; as a crown that rests on a head which has been severed from its body, and is therefore unmeaning. We obstinately refuse to live—to quote Goethe's words again—not only "in the beautiful and the good," but also "in the whole," which is equally necessary for a well-ordered life. What it seems to me we need is to teach the facts of life-giving, or, in other words, of sex, as a great, wide, open-air law, running right through animated creation, an ever-ascending progression forming a golden ladder leading up to man.

In explaining the facts of reproduction, I would therefore suggest that you should begin with the lowest rung of the ladder, the simplest organisms, such as the amoeba or the volvox. I should show how these multiply by fission, the creature dividing into two, when it is impossible to tell which is the father and which is the mother. I would then pass upwards to more complex organisms, where two individuals are required to form the offspring. You could explain the whole process by the method of fertilization in plants, as urged in an excellent paper by a lady doctor, published in the Parents' Review.[16] Let me quote her words:

"The child can learn the difference of the names, color, and forms of flowers as soon as it can learn anything. The next step would be to simple lessons in the different parts of a plant—the vegetative organs of roots, stem, leaves, passing on to the reproductive organs in the flower—calyx, corolla, stamen, and pistil. Let the child be taught to notice that all flowers have not quite the same organs, some bearing stamens only, which shed the powdery pollen and are the male, or little father flowers; while others have the pistil only, furnished with the stigma to catch the pollen, and are the females, or little mothers; that the one sort of flowers is necessary to the other in producing the little seed or baby plant."

Let us take a primrose. Here the mother and father elements are found in the same flower. At the base of the flower, packed in a delicate casket, which is called the ovary, lie a number of small white objects no larger than butterfly-eggs. These are the eggs or ova of the primrose. Into this casket, by a secret opening, filmy tubes thrown out by the pollen grains—now enticed from their hiding-place on the stamens and clustered on the stigma—enter and pour a fertilizing fluid, called "spermatozoa," through a microscopic gateway, which opens in the wall of the egg and leads to its inmost heart. The ovule, or future seed, is now fertilized and capable of producing a future primrose. Covered with many protecting coats, it becomes a perfect seed. The original casket swells, hardens, is transformed into a rounded capsule or seed-vessel, opening by valves or a deftly constructed hinge. One day this seed-vessel, crowded with seeds, breaks open and completes the cycle of reproduction by dispersing them over the ground, where they sow themselves, and grow and become primrose plants in their turn, starring the grass with their lovely blossoms.[17]

Sometimes the male and female elements grow upon different plants, as in the catkins children are so fond of gathering in the spring.

"More than two thousand years ago Herodotus observed a remarkable custom in Egypt. At a certain season of the year the Egyptians went into the desert, cut off branches from the wild palms, and bringing them back to their gardens, waved them over the flowers of the date-palm. Why they performed this ceremony they did not know; but they knew that if they neglected it the date-crop would be poor or wholly lost. But the true reason is now explained. Palm-trees, like human beings, are male and female. The garden plants, the date bearers, were females, the desert plants were males; and the waving of the branches over the females meant the transference of the pollen dust from the one to the other."[18]

From these two elements, the spermatozoa, or male element, and the ova, or female element, all life, except in the lowest organisms, is produced.

You could point out how it is by this marvellous process of reproduction, not only that the world is made green and beautiful, but all animal life is fed. Corn and rice, which are only fertilized seeds, form the staple food of a large proportion of mankind; while even the animal in order to live has first to be nourished on corn or grass before it can become meat for man.

You could go on further to illustrate the facts of reproduction by bees and ants, so familiar to children, where the drone or male bee, or the male ant, in just the same way as in the plant, fertilizes the eggs of the queen bee or ant by bringing the spermatozoa into contact with the unfertilized egg in the insect's body, when the eggs thus fertilized are laid and carefully nurtured by the working bee or ant. All children have observed the little neuter,[19] or working ant, carrying in its mandibles an egg almost as large as itself with an air of extreme hurry and absorption, to lay it in the sun till the warmth hatches it into a baby ant.

If it were further pointed out that not the male, but the female, as the mother of the species, is Nature's chief care; that among ants the male is sent into the world so imperfectly endowed that he cannot even feed himself, but is fed by his female relations, and that as soon as he has performed his function of fertilizing the queen ant, Nature apparently dismisses him with contemptuous starvation; or—to take the case of the drone or male bee—he is stung to death by the workers, it might help to modify the preposterous pretensions of the male, especially of the boy, in higher circles.

You could then pass upwards through fish with the soft and hard roe, or male and female elements which are familiar to children, and through frogs with their spawn to birds. Here comes in an upward step indeed. "A world that only cared for eggs becomes," as Professor Drummond observes in his Ascent of Man, "a world that cares for its young." The first faint trembling dawn, or at least shadowing forth, of a moral life, in the care of the strong for the weak, makes itself seen, which henceforth becomes as pervasive an element in Nature as the fierce struggle for existence in which the weak are destroyed by the strong.[20]

In the bird—till now "the free queen of the air," living at her own wild will, suddenly fettered and brooding on her nest, and covering her helpless young with her tender wings—we see some faint image of the Divine tenderness. In the ceaseless toil of both the parent birds from morning till night to fill the little gaping throats we begin to feel the duty of the strong to serve and protect the weak; and in the little hen partridge, still clinging to her nest, when the flash of the scythe is drawing nearer and nearer, till reapers have told me they have feared the next sweep of the scythe might cut off her head, we see more than a shadow of that mother's love which is stronger than death. And when we pass lastly to the highest order of animals, the mammalia, we find them named after the mother's function of giving suck to her young from her own breast. They are no longer matured in an external egg, but are borne in her own body till they are able to breathe, and seek their nourishment from her, and then they are born so helpless that, as with kittens and puppies, they often cannot even see.

In this higher order of animals nothing can exceed the devotion of the mother to her young in their helpless infancy. The fierce bear will recklessly expose her shaggy breast to the hunter in their defence. Here, too, we find, as the Duke of Argyle points out in his book on The Unity of Nature,

"that the equality of the sexes, as regards all the enjoyments as well as the work of life, is the universal rule; and among those of them in which the social instincts have been especially implanted, and whose systems of polity are like the most civilized polities of men, the females of the race are treated with a strange mixture of love, loyalty, and devotion."

"Man" as the Duke says, "is the Great Exception," and has been defined as the only animal that ill-treats and degrades his female.

And when at length we come to the topmost step, "the roof and crown of things,"—Man, as you have already explained the physical facts of life-giving on the plane of plants, and ants, and bees, where they can excite no feeling of any kind, you will have no need to go over them again, but will find yourself free to express the physical in terms of the moral. Man, as a spiritual being, incarnate in an animal body, takes this great law of sex which we have seen running through the animated creation, and lifts it into the moral and the spiritual. The physical love which in animals only lasts for the brief time that is needed for the production and rearing of offspring—becomes in him a love which "inhabiteth eternity," and unites him to the mother of his children in the indissoluble union of marriage. His fatherhood becomes the very representative of the Father in heaven. The mother becomes the very type and image of the Love that has loved us with more than a mother's love, borne with us with more than a mother's patience, suffered for us, in the Cross and Passion, more than a mother's pangs, to bring us into a higher life. The love of brothers and sisters becomes the first faint beginning of the universal Church and the brotherhood of man; and the sweet babble of their voices grows choral at length in the songs of the Church triumphant, the unbroken family in heaven; while the Christian home shadows forth the eternal home which awaits us hereafter.[21]

The only warning you would have to give your boy would be to point out that, as a cathedral takes longer to build than a shanty, so the human body, which is meant to be the temple of the "Lord and Giver of life," takes much longer to mature than an animal's. Many an animal lives and dies of old age in the fourteen years that leave man still an immature boy. And you must earnestly impress upon him that the whole of this part of his nature which you have been explaining to him as a great law running through animated creation and finding its highest uses in Man, must be left to mature itself in absolute rest and quiet. All premature use of it is fatal to perfect health of soul and body. The less he thinks of it, and the more he thinks of his work and his athletics, the better for him. Above all, you hope, now that he knows the truth and his curiosity is satisfied, he will loathe all filthy jests and stories about that which is the source of all beautiful living things on the pleasant earth and, in his own little world, of all happy family life and innocent home love and joy.

Let me quote here, in conclusion, a little poem, called "The Golden Ladder," which seems to me to embody some of the teaching of this exquisite page of the illuminated Word of Creation, which man has so blotted and defiled with his obscenities, but which to "open hearts and love-lit eyes" is the spring of all that is highest—the birth of the moral and the cradle of the divine.

"When torn with Passion's insecure delights,
By Love's dear torments, ceaseless changes worn,
As my swift sphere full twenty days and nights
Did make, ere one slow morn and eve were born;

"I passed within the dim, sweet world of flowers,
Where only harmless lights, not hearts, are broken,
And weep out the sweet-watered summer showers—
World of white joys, cool dews, and peace unspoken;

"I started, even there among the flowers,
To find the tokens mute of what I fled—
Passions, and forces, and resistless powers,
That have uptorn the world and stirred the dead.

"In secret bowers of amethyst and rose,
Close wrapped in fragrant golden curtains laid,
Where silver lattices to morn unclose,
The fairy lover clasps his flower-maid.

"Ye blessed children of the jocund day!
What mean these mysteries of love and birth?
Caught up like solemn words by babes at play,
Who know not what they babble in their mirth.

"Or of one stuff has some Hand made us all,
Baptized us all in one great sequent plan,
Where deep to ever vaster deep may call,
And all their large expression find in Man?

"Flowers climb to birds, and birds and beasts to Man,
And Man to God, by some strong instinct driven;
And so the golden ladder upward ran,
Its foot among the flowers, its top in heaven.

"All lives Man lives; of matter first then tends
To plants, an animal next unconscious, dim,
A man, a spirit last, the cycle ends,—
Thus all creation weds with God in him.

"And if he fall, a world in him doth fall,
All things decline to lower uses; while
The golden chain that bound the each to all
Falls broken in the dust, a linkless pile.

"And Love's fair sacraments and mystic rite
In Nature, which their consummation find,
In wedded hearts, and union infinite
With the Divine, of married mind with mind,

Foul symbols of an idol temple grow,
And sun-white Love is blackened into lust,
And man's impure doth into flower-cups flow,
And the fair Kosmos mourneth in the dust.

O Thou, out-topping all we know or think,
Far off yet nigh, out-reaching all we see,
Hold Thou my hand, that so the top-most link
Of the great chain may hold, from us to Thee;

"And from my heaven-touched life may downward flow
Prophetic promise of a grace to be;
And flower, and bird, and beast, may upward grow,
And find their highest linked to God in me."

Possibly you will say at once, "Oh, my boy has no taste for natural history, and he would take no interest in this kind of thing." All the better his finding it a bit dry—it will rid the subject of some of its dangerous attraction. I have yet to find the boy for whom the Latin Grammar has the least interest; but we do not excuse him on that ground from grinding at it. Whether he takes an interest in it or not, you have to teach him that he has got to know about these things before going to school, to guard him from the danger of having all sorts of false, and often foul, notions palmed off on him. I do not say that pure knowledge will necessarily save, but I do say that the pitcher which is full of clear spring-water has no room for foul. I do say that you have gained a great step, if in answer to the offer of enlightenment which he is certain to receive, you have enabled your boy to acquit himself of the rough objurgation—forgive me for putting it in schoolboy language: "Oh, hold your jaw! I know all about that, and I don't want any of your rot." I do say that early associations are most terribly strong, and if you will secure that those early associations with regard to life and birth shall be bound up with all the sanctities of life—with home, with his mother, with family, with all that is best and highest in life; then his whole attitude in life will be different. But if these early associations are linked with all that is false and foul, some subtle odor of the sewer will still cling about the heart of the shrine, a nameless sense of something impure in the whole subject; an undefinable something in his way of looking at it, which has often made the purity of men—blameless in their outer life—- sadden and perplex me almost as much as the actions and words of confessedly impure men.

IV

But, whatever is the importance I attach to pure teaching, I return to my old position, that purity is an attitude of soul, or, perhaps I ought to say, the "snowy bloom" of the soul's perfect health, rather than anything you can embody in moral maxims or pure knowledge—that perfect bloom of spiritual health which may be as much the result of a mother's watchful care and training as the physical health of the body. It is for you to train your boy in that knightly attitude of soul, that reverence for womanhood, which is to men as "fountains of sweet water" in the bitter sea of life; that chivalrous respect for the weak and the unprotected which, next to faith in God, will be the best guard to all the finer issues of his character. Truth of truth are the golden words of Ruskin to young men:

"Whomsoever else you deceive, whomsoever else you injure, whomsoever else you leave unaided, you must not deceive, nor injure, nor leave unaided according to your power any woman whatever, of whatever rank. Believe me, every virtue of the highest phase of manly character begins and ends in this, in truth and modesty before the face of all maidens, in truth and reverence or truth and pity to all womanhood."

Can we doubt or question this, we who worship Him who came to reveal the true man quite as much as to reveal the only true God—the real manhood beneath the false, perishable man with which it is so often overlaid by the influence of society and the world? Look at His attitude towards women, ay, even Eastern women, who had not been ennobled by centuries of Christian freedom and recognized equality of the sexes, but who, on the contrary, belonged to a nation tainted to some degree with that Eastern contempt for women which made a Hindu answer the question of the Englishman, perplexed by the multiplied of Indian gods and sects, "Is there no point of belief in which you all unite?" "Oh, yes," the Pundit replied, "we all believe in the sanctity of cows and the depravity of women!"

These Eastern women, therefore, had much to enslave and lower them; but see how instantly they rose to the touch of the true Man, just as they will rise, the women of to-day, to the touch of the true manhood of your sons, if you will train them to be to us such men as Jesus Christ was. See how He made women His friends, and deigned to accept their ministry to His human needs. Many severe rebukes are recorded from His lips to men, but not one to a woman. It was a woman, ay, even a degraded woman, who by her kisses and her tears smote the Rock of Ages and the water of life flowed forth for the world, who won for the world the words: "He who hath been forgiven much loveth much," and the burden of guilt is changed into the burden of Love. It was to a woman He first gave the revelation of life, that He first revealed Himself as the Water of Life, and first uttered the words, "I am the Resurrection and the Life." It was women who remained faithful when all forsook Him and fled. It was a woman who was the last to whom He spoke on the cross, to a woman that the first words were spoken of His risen life. It was a woman He made His first messenger of the risen life to the world. Nothing in the life of the true Man on earth stands out in more marked features than, if I may venture to use the words, His faith in women, as if to stamp it forever as an attribute of all true manhood, that without which a man cannot be a man.

Now, side by side with this attitude of the true Man, this perfect loyalty to all womanhood as such, ay, even degraded womanhood, place the present debased attitude of men, even of some Christian men, which we are looking to you mothers of boys to change in toto. Is not a powerful writer in the Westminster Review right when he says, "There is not found a chivalrous respect for womanhood as such. That a woman has fallen is not the trumpet call to every noble and wise-hearted man to raise her up again as speedily as may be; rather it is the signal to deepen her degradation and to doom her to moral death." Is it not a received code even among Americans as well as Englishmen that if a woman knows how to respect and protect herself men are to respect her—it is only a scoundrel that will dare to say an insulting word to her? But if she is a bit fast and giddy, if she has little or no respect for herself, if her foolish feet have slipped ever so little, then she is fair game. "She gave him encouragement; what else could she expect? It was her own fault." To expect that any man with an ounce of true manhood in him would at once say, "That young girl does not in the least realize the danger she is in, and I must get between her and the edge of the precipice, and see that she comes to no harm."—this would be to expect the wildly impossible. Have we not made up our mind that the beast and not the Christ is our master here; and does not every beast spring at once on a fallen prey? It is human nature, and you will never get men to think and act any differently. As to faith in man as such, not only in the church-going man, but in the rough-spoken fisherman, the contemned publican, the infidel Samaritan, faith in his power of recognizing and rising to the truth, the higher standard placed before him, that I sometimes think lies buried in that Eastern garden—in the Sepulchre "wherein never man yet lay."[22] And yet it is the man as revealed in Jesus Christ, not the man as fashioned by the world, with its low traditions and low public opinion, that is true to human nature. In moments of excitement or danger he reverts to this true nature, which has been so warped and overlaid by the world. In the great mass meetings which I held for the purpose of pleading with men to come over on my side and help me in the work of saving women from the awful doom to which men sentence them, I used to bring this home by saying to them: "If a fire were to break out in this vast hall, who would be the first person that you would try to save? It would be me because I am a woman"; and the roar of assent that burst forth from all parts of the building showed that I had struck home. I used to bring before them—and the sooner you bring it before your boys the better—the conduct of the men on the ill-fated Birkenhead—ah! dear men, voiceless and nameless, and lost in that "vast and wandering grave" into which they sank, what have they not done to raise the tone of England? You will possibly remember that the Birkenhead, with a troop of our soldiers on board, struck and foundered not far from land. The women and children were at once crowded into the boats, and it was only when, in a few minutes, the ship began to settle that the cry was heard among the men, "To the boats! to the boats! every man for himself!" But the officer in command stood up and shouted, "What! and swamp the women and children? Die rather!" And those men did die. Drawn up in military array, without moving a muscle, those men sank into the bitter waters of death, that the women and children might live.[23] That I contend is man's true nature, to love the woman, and, if needs be, to give himself for her.

It is, therefore, to recognize and strengthen this true nature of man, to get it deeper into him, and not to get it out of him, as I cannot but feel we have hitherto more or less done, to train your boys in this perfect loyalty to all womanhood as such; and to send forth men into the world to "die rather" than save themselves at the cost of a woman, to "die rather" than drive a woman down into those deep waters of degradation and death, that we look to the mothers of the future as the sole hope of the world. I say again you have got to see that they learn in relation to their own sisters what they have to practise towards all women, however humble, ay, and however degraded, in their future life. As the great English oaks are built up of tiny cells, so this true manliness must be built up by a mother's watchful use of a thousand small daily incidents—by what Wordsworth rightly calls the best part of a good man's life—

"His little daily, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love."

In themselves they seem almost too trivial to mention:—the easy chair instinctively given up on the sister's entrance; the door opened for any woman passing out; the cap removed in the presence of ladies, even though those ladies are his own relatives; the deck-chair taken out by the seaside to make the mother comfortable; the favorite cricket-match given up if an expedition has been fixed in which his services are needed; the window raised and the door shut on leaving a railway-carriage in which women are travelling, so as not to expose them to draught; and, when men-servants are not kept, the sister's bicycle cleaned or the skates polished—all those "little daily, unremembered acts" of knightly service which the mere presence of a woman ought to inspire in a man.

I am well aware that here again, as Mr. Philip Hamerton points out, the boarding-school presents a difficulty. As he says, "The worst of the distant school system is that it deprives the home residence that remains of all beneficial discipline; for the boys are guests during the holidays, and the great business is to amuse them."[24]

But surely this needs only to be mentioned to be remedied. You do not make your boys happier during their holidays by making them selfish: what is really a novelty to a schoolboy, fresh from the association with boys only, is to have sisters to look after and a mother to depend upon him for all sorts of little services. A joyous exclamation on your part, "Oh, what a comfort it is to have a boy in the house to do things for one!" will make him swell with manly pride; and should he show the least tendency to put upon his sisters and make them fetch and carry for him, as they are only too willing to do, you can easily put a stop to that by a few caustic remarks that you don't want savages in your house; and a pointed use of that delightful story in one of the White Cross papers,[25] of the Zulu chief to whom the Government sent a propitiatory present of wagons and wheelbarrows, thinking that it would be sure to please him. But he gazed on them with fine scorn, exclaiming: "What's the use of those things for carrying our burdens when we have plenty of women!" Or you can use that equally good story, told by Sir John Lubbock at a sectional meeting of the British Association for the Promotion of Science, of a remote tribe of savages who had never seen a bullock, and when the white man arrived with his bullock wagons, after much perplexed discussion, they came to the conclusion that, as they were used for heavy loads, they must be the white man's wives!

A little wholesome, if incisive, raillery on your part will quickly extinguish any tendency to make willing slaves of his sisters. If, however, you prefer to indulge your foolish fondness for him, that subtle self-indulgence which makes it easier for you to sacrifice yourself and his sisters to him rather than discipline him to work out his true nature, remember you gratify yourself at his most cruel cost. You produce the boy whose youth is marked by a tacit contempt for girls and whose manhood will be disfigured by a light estimation of the beauty and sanctity of womanhood.

I know well I shall be told that all this is quite out of date; that modern girls are so independent that they stand in no need of brothers, but like to place themselves on a level with them and share as good comrades in all their rough-and-tumble games. Let us be of good cheer. Sex is a very ancient institution, the slow evolution of hundreds of centuries, and is in no danger of being obliterated by the fashion of a day. Take the most advanced "new woman"; yes, concealed under that virile shirt-front, unchoked by that manly necktie and turned-up collar, lurking beneath that masculine billy-cock; nay, hidden somewhere deeper down than the pockets of even those male knickerbockers, you will find the involuntary pleasurable thrill at a strong man's chivalrous attention, the delicious sense of a man's care and protection, which centuries and centuries of physical weakness have woven into the very tissues of her being, in however loud and strident a voice she may deny it. Whatever changes in the position of women may take place, the basic fact remains, and will always remain, the man is stronger than the woman, and his strength is given him to serve the weaker; and you have got to get your girls to be your fellow-helpers in developing all that is best and most chivalrous in their brothers, and not so to run riot in their independence as to substitute a boyish camaraderie for the exquisite relations of the true man to the true woman.

There rises up now before me a boy, one of those delightful English boys overflowing with pluck and spirits. His mother had come to one of my meetings, and, like so many other mothers, I am thankful to say, had received a lifelong impression from what I said with regard to the training of boys, and she resolved, there and then, to act upon my advice with her own boys. She told me some two years after, that this boy had come in late one afternoon and explained to her that a little girl had asked him to direct her to rather an out-of-the-way house. "I thought she might ask that question of some one who would tell her wrong, or that she might come to some harm, so I thought I had better go with her and see her safe to the house." "But what of the cricket-match that you wanted so to see?" his mother asked. "Oh, I had to give that up. There wasn't time for both."

On another occasion, when a Christmas-tree was being prepared in the schoolroom for some choristers, as he and his mother left at dusk a chorister tried to force himself past her and gain a private view; and when she refused him admittance, not recognizing who she was, called her a very disrespectful name. Instantly the boy flew at him like a little tiger, "How dare you speak to my mother like that!" "I didn't see it was your mother," the chorister pleaded, trying to ward off the blows. "But you saw it was a woman, and somebody's mother, and you dare to speak to her like that!" And such a storm of fisticuffs fell on every part of that hulking young chorister's person as forced him at last to cry for mercy and promise that he would never do so again. That boy's master wrote to his mother towards the end of his school-time—he was a Bluecoat boy—and said that he positively dreaded his leaving, as his influence on the side of everything good, and pure, and high was quite that of a master.

And now I come to the question of religious teaching, which you may be surprised that I have not put first of all. First of all, in one sense, I do put it. There can be no greater safeguard to purity of life than vital religion. I do not go so far as some evangelical mothers who have told me that nothing less than the conversion of their boys would be of the least avail to keep them morally straight; on the contrary, I have known men who have never come under any strong religious influence, but have grown up sceptical scientific men, yet who have led lives as pure as any woman's. Common manhood, with the "Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world"; common love for mother and sister, which for their sakes maketh it impossible to wrong their womanhood, even when fallen into the dust; common self-respect, which is so strong in some men, and makes them shrink from anything in the nature of mud, is often sufficient to accomplish this end. But still, when all is said, if in answer to your mother's prayers you can implant in your boy a sense of the Divine Presence and the cry of the quickened conscience, "How can I do this great sin and wickedness against God?" you have doubtless given him the best panoply against the fiery darts of temptation. Only I would again warn you that there must be no forcing of the religious emotions, no effort to gather the fruits of the spirit before the root, in the shape of the great cardinal virtues everywhere presupposed in Christian ethics, has been nourished, and strengthened, and watered into strong, healthy growth. We have to bear in mind our Lord's words, which it seems to me religious parents sometimes forget, that there is an order of growth in spiritual things as in natural—first the blade, then the ear, and then the full corn in the ear; and we are not to try to force the full corn in the ear before the stalk and the blade have grown. For the want of laying to heart these words of the great Teacher, I have known much pulpy, emotional religion engrafted on young souls—admirably adapted to exhaust the soil, but with the smallest possible bearing upon right conduct; a religion perfectly at its ease with much scamping of lessons and hard work in general; indulgent of occasional cribbing, and of skilful manipulation of awkward truth, of betting and small extravagances; and innocent of all sense of dishonesty in allowing a struggling parent to pay large sums for education while the school-time so purchased, often at the cost of home comforts and pleasant outings, is squandered in idleness.

What a boy really needs, and, indeed, all immature things—for I found it equally true of immature men—is a simple, practical religion, based more on the facts of life and conscience than on doctrines and dogmas. To know God as his Father; to know that he has a Redeemer who laid down His life to save him from sin and who takes account of his smallest and most broken effort to do what is right; to realize that it is only so far as he is like Christ and in Christ that he can be really a man and work out what is highest in him; to know that he has been baptized into a Divine Society, binding him to fight against all wrong, both within and in the world without; above all, to know that there is a supreme spiritual Power within him and about him to enable him to do right, and that in the line of duty "I can't" is a lie in the lips that repeat, "I believe in the Holy Ghost"; this is as much as his young soul can assimilate, not as mere religious phrases, but as realities to live by.

"So nigh to glory is our dust,
So nigh to God is man,
When duty whispers low 'Thou must,'
The soul replies, 'I can.'"

But see that beneath all this he has the special Christian teaching with regard to the sanctity of the body thoroughly instilled into him. If the Incarnation means anything, it means not the salvation and sanctification of a ghost, but the salvation and consecration of the whole man, of his body as well as his soul. True, the animal body to a spiritual being must always be a "body of humiliation," but nothing can be more unfortunate and misleading than the epithet in the Authorized Version of "vile" as a translation of the Greek word used by St. Paul. On the contrary, we are taught that even this mortal body is a temple of the Holy Ghost.

In teaching this there can be no difficulty; you can make use of a child's natural reverence for a church. You can say, "What would you think if you heard of some loose lads breaking into a church, and just for the fun of the thing strewing the aisles with cinder dust and all sorts of loose rubbish; tearing out the pages of Bibles and hymn-books to light their pipes, and getting drunk out of the chalice? You would be honestly shocked at such profanity. Nay, even in the dire exigencies of war we do not think better of the Germans for having stabled their horses in one of the French churches and left their broken beer-bottles on the high altar and the refuse of a stable strewn up and down the nave. Yet a church is, after all, only a poor earthly building, built by human hands. But there is one temple which God has built for Himself, the temple of man's body; and of that the terrible words are written, and ever fulfilled, "If any man defile that temple, him will God destroy." God's great gift of speech is not to be defiled by dirty talk, by profane language, by lies, or evil speaking. The organs which are given us for its sustenance are not to be denied by gluttony and piggishness, either in food or drink. The boy is not to use any part of his body in defiling ways which he would be ashamed for his own mother to know of. To do so is not only to defile, but—with the double meaning of the Greek word, which we cannot render into English—to destroy; to weaken his brain-power, which he wants for his work in life, to weaken his nervous system, lessening his strength thereby and rendering him less able to excel in athletics, and often, if carried to excess, in after-life bringing results which are the very embodiment of the terrible words, "Him will God destroy." The full force and bearing of this teaching he may not apprehend. I have already said that with a young boy the lower appeal never to do anything that is low and dirty and blackguardly will have far more practical weight, and will also avoid laying undue stress on the religious emotions. But I am quite sure that the Christian teaching of the sanctity of the body must be laid deep and strong with all the force of early impression in a boy's inmost being, in order that it may lie ready for future use when Nature has developed those instincts of manhood which will teach him its full significance.

If you are an Episcopalian, you will of course find the time of your boy's confirmation simply invaluable as one of those turning-points which will enable you to speak, or possibly write, more unreservedly than is possible on more ordinary occasions. I would earnestly ask you to give him a little White Cross confirmation paper called Purity the Guard of Manhood, a paper which an Eton master pronounced the best thing he had met with of the kind, and which has been widely used. Do not rest content with merely giving the paper in a perfunctory way, but follow it up with a few living, earnest words of your own.

Of course I should do a wrong to your womanly instincts if I were to think it necessary to say that the inculcation of purity must be always in a mother's heart, but only on her lips on some marked occasions, such as the first going to school, the last day of the holidays, or when your boy himself gives the occasion by some question he may ask you, but above all when he reaches a critical age, when a few words from your own lips will be worth all the printed pages in the world. Only ever and always make it an essential element of his idea of manliness to be pure, and do not forget constantly to couple the words "brave and pure," or "manly and pure," or "pure and high character," in his hearing; that he may be endued, not with that pale, emasculate thing that passes muster for purity nowadays, which always seems to me chiefly conscious of its own indecency, full of the old nervous "touch not, taste not, handle not" spirit, bandaged up with this restriction and that lest it fall to pieces, and when it comes to saving another from defilement in body and soul shuffling uneasily into a pair of lavender kid-gloves and muttering something about its being "such a very delicate subject"—nay, not this, but that militant sun-clad power which Milton dreamed of, rushing down like a sword of God to smite everything low, and base and impure; a purity as of mountain water or living fire, whose very nature it is, not only to be pure itself, but to destroy impurity in others.

V

And now let me throw together two or three practical suggestions, which will probably be superfluous to the most experienced mothers, but may be useful to younger and more inexperienced parents.

In the first place, I think there are few of the heads of the medical profession who would not agree with me that our English dietary is too stimulating and too abundant. Sir Andrew Clark certainly held that a large proportion of our diseases spring from over-eating and over-drinking. I don't suppose that for a boy it so much matters, as he is eating for "edification" as well as for sustenance, for the building up of his walls as well as for the nutrition of his existing frame. But "the boy is father to the man," and I would ask you not to accustom your boys to a rich dietary, as the habit once formed will be prolonged into early manhood, and undoubtedly such stimulating diet does greatly increase the temptations with which young men have to contend. It is perfectly unnecessary for the developing of strength and stature, as is shown by the splendid Scotchmen who yearly carry off some of our highest university distinctions and prizes—many of them farmer lads who have scarcely tasted meat in their boyhood, but have been brought up on the simple farinaceous food of the country. There was much force and meaning in the quaint congratulatory telegram sent by a friend to a Cambridge Senior Wrangler hailing from Scotland, "Three cheers for the parritge!" And that curious and most impressive fact which Mr. Bayard, the late American Ambassador, hunted up for our edification from various dictionaries of biography—the fact, namely, that a large proportion of our most eminent men spring from the homes of the poorer clergy, where certainly sumptuous fare and much meat do not obtain, is a proof that abstemious living, while forming a valuable discipline for the soul, does not injure but promotes the health of the body and the strength of the brain. Our having given up the religious uses of fasting I often think is a loss to young men; and it might, therefore, be as well if we were to imitate our "Corybantic" brethren, the Salvationists, and institute a week of self-denial, leaving the children to work out an economical dietary, with due care on our part that it should be fairly nutritious, and allowing them to give what they have saved from the ordinary household expenses to any cause in which they may be interested. It would give them a wholesome lesson in self-denial and cheap living; both lessons much needed in these luxurious days. But whether this suggestion finds favor or not, we have always to bear in mind that "plain living" is the necessary companion of "high thinking"—the lowly earth-born twin who waits upon her heavenly sister.

On the vexed question of the use of alcohol there was but one point on which there was a consensus of opinion in the discussion by our leading medical men, which appeared some years ago in the pages of the Contemporary Review. The point upon which they were all agreed was that alcohol is injurious to children, and if the boy has been accustomed from his early youth to do without it, and, as he grows up, remains a total abstainer, there is no question that his abstinence will prove a great safeguard; though I cannot go as far as some of my abstaining friends, who seem to regard the use of alcohol as the root of what must, in the nature of things, be one of the strongest primal passions of human nature, and therefore liable to abuse, whether men are total abstainers or not. Anyhow, though a lad can be trained to strict moderation, abstinence in both alcohol and tobacco must after a time come of the lad's own free will; the last thing that answers is to multiply and enforce restrictions; the rebound is inevitable and often fatal. But I do say that where there is a great pinching in the home in order to afford the educational advantages of school and university, it does show some radical defect in the training of our boys that they should indulge in such expensive habits, especially the expensive and wholly unnecessary habit of smoking, when the dear mother and young sisters are doing without many a little home comfort in order to meet the expense of the young rascal's education. One rich old grandmother whom I met abroad promised each of her grandsons fifty pounds if they would give up smoking; and it was marvellous how that stern necessity of doing as other young men do disappeared like their own tobacco smoke before the promise of that fifty pounds for their own pockets! They were all able to claim it one after the other. If boys were not trained by their mothers to be systematically selfish, might not the home-claims in the heart be as strong as those fifty pounds in the pocket?

Secondly, with regard to betting and gambling, which may be classed with drinking, as the fruitful parent of bad company, and a descensus ad infernum:—do you not think a boy may be best guarded against a habit of betting, which is so likely to lead on to gambling, by taking the same line as a boy of my acquaintance took with his mother when she was warning him against it: "Well, mother, you see, it always does seem so mean to me to get a fellow's money from him without giving him anything in return; it always does seem so like prigging, and some of our fellows are awfully hard up, and can't afford to lose a penny." Mr. Gladstone was evidently of the same opinion when he once said to his private secretary, Sir Edward Hamilton, that he "regarded gambling as nothing short of damnable. What can be the fun of winning other people's money?" This strikes me as a way of putting it which would appeal most forcibly to a boy; and if, in addition, we were to point out to him that, like all shady things, it has a tendency to grow and sharpen the man into a sharper and develop the blood-sucking apparatus of a leech, besides bringing wretchedness and misery on others, he might be led to resist the first beginnings of a betting habit which may lead on to gambling in after years.

And here I would say that the absolute absence of any training given to a boy in the right use and value of money, which has obtained till lately in our English schools, is surely suicidal and must lend itself to every form of abuse. I do not know whether it is the same with you, but many of our boys know money only in the form of pocket-money, when it becomes to him a metal token mostly signifying so much "tuck"; becoming, as he grows older, more and more deleterious "tuck" in the shape of billiards, betting, etc., and ending in a general going "on tick," which is worse still. But in this matter we are improving. I think most sensible parents nowadays place a small sum at their bank to the boy's account, with a check-book, making him responsible at first for small articles of clothing, neckties, shirt-collars, etc, and as soon as he shows himself trustworthy, for all his expenses except school bills. The boy is expected to keep accounts, get nothing without first asking the price, and to bring his receipted bills at the end of the term to his father, and see that they tally with his foils; and, above all, always to pay in ready money—unpaid bills being contemplated in the bald light of shop-lifting. To this I would add, if possible, the habit of giving the Jewish tenth, so as to make giving a steady principle, and not a hap-hazard impulse.

Thirdly, it is a vital point to give your boys interesting pursuits. There is great force in the rough old saying, "Never give the devil an empty chair to sit down upon, and you won't be much troubled with his company." Vice is constantly only idleness which has turned bad,—idleness being emphatically a thing that will not keep, but turns rotten. It is not the great industrial centres of our population that are chiefly ravaged by vice; it is the fashionable watering-places, the fashionable quarters of large towns, where idle men congregate, in which it is a "pestilence that walketh in darkness," and slays its thousands of young girls. "Empty by filling," has always been a favorite motto of mine. How many a young man has been driven to betting, drinking, and the race-course from the want of something of interest to fill his unoccupied hours, because more wholesome tastes have never been developed in him! Of course, tastes must be to a certain degree inborn, but I am quite sure that many a taste perishes, like a frost-bitten bud, full of the promise of blossom and fruit, because it has never been given the opportunity to develop.

Take a boy's innate love of collecting. Could you not develop it by the offer of a little prize for the best collection of dried flowers, of butterflies or insects, of birds' eggs, even, in some cases, of geological specimens, but, in any case, with the scientific and common names attached; so forming a healthy taste for natural history, which may be a source of perpetual interest and profit in after-life? Do not let your dislike of destroying life interfere; reverence for life can be as well, nay, better taught by insisting that only the necessary specimens should be given of each species, only one or two eggs taken from the nest, and the nest itself disturbed as little as possible. Chemistry and electricity also appeal to a boy's love of experimentizing and of making electrical contrivances, easily constructed of the commonest materials. As to hand-work, the lack of which in ill-health has made so many a man a torment both to himself and others, there ought to be no difficulty with regard to that. Carpentering, wood-carving, repoussé-work in metal, bent-iron work, mosaic work, any of these, except possibly the last, may be set on foot with very little expense, besides drawing, modelling, etc. Where there are sufficient means it would be a good thing if boys were taught, as far as may be, how things are made and the amount of toil that goes into the simplest article. I remember giving a small printing-press to a boy of ours—an excellent gift, by the by, for a lad, and it can be had for five or six shillings—and his coming to me soon after with a match-box in his hand, exclaiming with wonderment, "Why, auntie, there are six different kinds of type on this match-box!" If they could learn how to build, how rafters and joists are put in, and construct as much as a miniature summer-house in the garden, how useful this being able to turn their hands to anything might prove to them in their after-life. And with what added respect they would look upon all labor if they had never looked upon it as the part of a "gentleman" to stand aloof from it.

Lastly, but not least, I would plead most earnestly for the frequent home-letter, should your boy be sent to a boarding-school. If you would have him resist the temptations of school life, keep the home as close to his heart and as present to his mind as you can. Make it your first and paramount duty to write every day if you can, if not every other day, at least twice a week.

Do not misunderstand me here. God knows I do not go in for the devoted mother who thinks of nothing but her boys and to whom the whole world besides is nothing but an empty flourish of the pen about their names. Such mothers are like Chinese teacups, with no perspective and everything out of proportion; where the Mandarin is as big as the Pagoda, and suffers from a pathetic inability to get in at his own door. You must see things in moral perspective in order to train character on large and noble lines. And it is from the rough quarry of the outside world, with its suffering and sin, that you must fetch the most precious stones for the building up of true manhood or womanhood. The sooner children are taught that their small concerns must be subordinated at times to the needs of the sick, the poor, and the suffering, the better for them. For a mother, therefore, to undertake some outside work may and will prove the best element in their education, enabling them in their turn to live in relation with the world in which God has placed them and do their part in the service of humanity.

All that I mean is, do not so crowd your life with outside work or social engagements as to have no time to spare for this daily or at least bi-weekly letter to the boys at school. Bear in mind that the most important work you can do for the world is the formation of noble character, building it up stone by stone as you alone can do. Do not be too busy to make yourself your boy's friend and throw yourself heartily into all that interests him. I have known philanthropic mothers to whom cricket was nothing but an unmeaning scurrying backwards and forwards, and who scarcely knew the stern of a boat from its bows!

And what a liberal education a mother's home-letters to her boys at school might be made! The stirring incident in the newspapers, the fine passage in the book, a verse or two of a noble poem, as well as all the loving thought and prayer that is for ever flying like homing birds to the dear absent lads, and the inculcation of all things lovely and pure and manly, brightened by home jokes and the health of the last cherished pet—all these things might go to make up the home letters. Above all, what an opportunity it would give for pleading the cause of the little chaps who, by some strange insanity working in the brain of the British parent, are sent into the rough world of a large school when they are fitter for the nursery, and whom you might appeal to your boys to look after and protect, so far as they are able; and not only these, but to side with every boy who is being bullied for acting up to his conscience or because he has not the pluck to stand up for himself.

In conclusion, I would earnestly ask you to believe in your own power when united to the knowledge which is necessary to direct it. "A man is what a woman makes him," says the old saw. Look back upon the men you have known who have been touched to finest issues, and you will find, with few exceptions, that they are the shaping of a noble woman's hands—a noble mother, a noble wife, a noble sister. Doubt not, but earnestly believe that with those wonderful shaping hands of yours you can mould that boy of yours into the manhood of Sir Galahad, "whose strength was as the strength of ten because his heart was pure"; that you can send him forth into the world like King Arthur, of whom our own poet, Spenser, says, that the poorest, the most unprotected girl could feel that

"All the while he by his side her bore
She was as safe as in a sanctuary."

Nay, may I not go further still and say that by the grace of God you can send him forth "made of a woman" in the image of the strong and tender Manhood of Jesus Christ, to Whom even the poor lost girls out of the street could come and know that here was a Man who would not drag them down, but lift them up; believing in Whom, clinging to Whom, trusting in Whom, they grew no longer lost and degraded, but splendid saints of the Christian Church.

FOOTNOTES:

[ [11] Morality in Public Schools, by Dr. Butler, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and late Head-Master of Harrow.