The whole subject is so difficult, and one's opinions upon it, in cold ink as it were, are so liable to be misread, that I wish we could have had a quiet talk about it instead. But of course, since you cannot leave the school until the May holiday begins, and will have, if you decide to take so radical a step, to write to the boys' parents in India and Egypt, this is quite impossible. From your letter I seem to gather that this was your intention at the time of writing, and it is a decision in which I can sympathise with you very deeply.

For the whole ten years during which the school has been in your charge it has, to your almost certain knowledge, and according also to the testimony of many of your old pupils, been absolutely free from this "moral canker," as you describe it, that you have just discovered in it now. And even for a preparatory school, like yours, this is a record for which you are right to be profoundly thankful. It is one also that naturally throws up into a blacker relief the present condition of affairs. Moreover, having discovered its sphere to be at present fairly circumscribed-confined apparently to a single coterie of some half a dozen boys-the obvious course, as you say, would seem to be a prompt and thorough excision, pro bono publico.

And yet I believe that there's a better way-so much better that I am sure, before receiving this, you will have already found it, and abandoned your first decision. You won't expel the youngsters. You'll create instead a public feeling that will cure them. And you'll distribute them in such a way that each will be surrounded by it to his best advantage. I feel so certain that you'll have already made up your mind to do this that I won't put in any special pleading on behalf of these particular nippers or their parents abroad, although I sincerely believe that in taking so drastic a step as you suggest in your letter you would not only be magnifying their offence out of all proportion, but that the result all round would be more than harmful.

Instead, the point that I would most urgently put before you-in spite of many an old drawn battle upon the subject-is that the present little crisis would be an excellent excuse for reconsidering your position as regards giving to your scholars some definite physiological instruction. Because I am quite convinced that at least three-quarters of your moral canker would more properly be defined as physiological curiosity and that the whole problem is only secondarily one of actual perversity. Now your custom up to the present has had, I'll admit, a great deal to recommend it. For your boys come to you very young, usually at the age of nine or ten, shy and imaginative enough perhaps, but for the most part mentally sexless, and with an almost entirely objective outlook upon life. In other words, their inquisitiveness is eccentric rather than concentric. It's a happy condition, and one, as you say, that must be dealt with exceedingly carefully. When they leave you, somewhere about fourteen or fifteen years old, you usually take the opportunity of the good-bye interview to give them some warnings as to confronting moral dangers. But purposely, for fear of prematurely dissipating a desirable innocence, or awakening what you call an illegitimate curiosity, you keep your advice to generalities in all but the rarest instances. The possible stimulus to dangerous self-exploration in some unsuspecting youngster has always outweighed for you the advantages of a too direct explanation.

And this is where, in spite of your ten years' immunity, I feel sure that your methods have fallen short of the best. Self-exploration is only dangerous when it's blind, and if self-curiosity is ever illegitimate-and I don't see why it should be-we both know that some day or another it is going to become inevitable. We know more, because we are fully aware that some day or another it is going to be satisfied. And for the life of me I cannot see why mere physiological ignorance shouldn't be dispelled in the same routine that is employed for dispelling any other sort of ignorance, mathematical, historical, or what you will. It can be done, I am quite certain, without rubbing a particle off the sweet bloom of childhood, and it will go a very long way in preserving from a much ruder handling that of adolescence and early manhood. For it seems to me that the very fact of refraining from any definite instruction upon what, after all, from the purely physical point of view, is the bed-rock of our raison d'être, lends the subject in advance precisely that air of unnecessary and even shameful mystery which is responsible for about nine-tenths of our prudery on the one hand, and our obscenity on the other.

There's so little original in these reflections, they represent the attitude of so large a number of ordinarily thoughtful persons, that they may probably bore you. But, on the other hand, although there's a good deal of educational spade-work still before us, the day will certainly come, I think, when we shall treat and teach sexual phenomena in the same sane and self-consciousless way as we treat and teach the principles of personal cleanliness and physical hygiene. It will be a great day-may it come soon-and with its dawning will disappear not only the entire stock-in-trade of a not uncommon type of smoking-room raconteur, but a very considerable portion of actual and imaginative immorality. For if you cover up anything long enough, and refer to it slyly enough, you can be certain in the end of making its exposure indecent. If gloves became de rigueur for a couple of centuries we should raise prurient titters at the mention of a knuckle. No; it's air and sunlight and the salt of a bracing sanity in these matters that is our crying need.

"The sea," says Mr. Stacpoole in his clever romance "The Blue Lagoon," "is a great purifier," and proceeds, in a little piece of delicate and absolutely true psychology, to describe how Dick, the derelict boy on the coral island, instinctively ran naked with his sister in the presence of winds and waves, although some impulse, born probably of memory, bade him cover himself inland. But his decency was the same in either place.

And it's the sea air of a healthy knowledge and acceptance of these matters that we ought to be pumping through our schoolrooms, our dormitories, and our heart-to-heart talks with our children. Approach them frankly enough, and with no semblance of shamefacedness, and we needn't be afraid, I think, of any evil consequences. The guilty smile, the illicit joke, become disarmed in advance when their subject is treated in the same matter-of-fact and unmysterious fashion as those of geography or astronomy. And that is why, on the whole, I am opposed to the average "purity" volumes that are published for purposes of sexual instruction. For though they acknowledge this to be the solution of a large portion of the problem, they are so written, circulated, and advertised as to suggest rather an initiation into the unspeakable than a straightforward piece of natural history. And I suspect, as a consequence, that their sales are considerably larger among the prurient than the pious. An older generation was brought up on "Reading without tears." The next should have a companion volume "Biology without shame."

Forgive this sermon, but I have been confronted just lately with such a lot of human mental wreckage, the direct result, in my opinion, of the half-religious, half-fearful shrouds with which we always swaddle up these questions, that I rejoice in an opportunity for their wholesale condemnation. It was Mrs. Craigie, I think, who said that every girl of eighteen should read "Tom Jones." And one can see why, for it is a clean and wholesome history, if a little unspiritual. But her education, like her brother's, should not be left haphazard to the chance reading of a novel, or to the unnecessary blushes with which she ponders certain passages of Scripture.

Well, good-bye, old man, and God bless you. Chat it all over with the young sinners, and then work out a little course of lectures upon the reproduction of species. If you have never talked collectively to a roomful of boys upon the subject before, you will be surprised at the rapt interest and genuine solemnity with which they will attend to what you have to tell them. And the purity of your school won't suffer, I think, by its change of foundations.

Your affect. cousin,

Peter Harding.

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