origin. It is, indeed, by unrestrained intercourse with each other that boys are taught and encouraged to pursue this destructive practice. From false notions of delicacy, with a prudery as astonishing as it is criminal, the parents and guardians of boys refrain from all allusion to the subject, while in their hearts they must realize the imminence of the danger. Ready and willing to acknowledge it in the abstract, they seem to feel, and certainly they act, as though some special immunity were granted to their own proteges. Thus it happens that a boy contracts a habit, which, discovered too late, is well-nigh unconquerable in its thraldom, as it is formidable in its sad results, and which a few earnest, timely words would have surely prevented.
We charge then that the present system of education, by its faults of omission and commission, is directly responsible, not, it is true, for the bare existence, but for the enormous prevalence of vices and crimes which we here deplore, and we call upon the civil authorities to so modify the obnoxious arrangements of our schools, and upon parents and guardians to so instruct and govern their charges, that the evils may be suppressed if not extinguished. By the former this has been measurably effected in isolation of the sexes; by the latter, it may be, in encouraging the confidence and preparing the minds of boys for the great physiological crisis and its consequent dangers, whose advent they can easily and surely discern. In many instances the requisite instruction and counsel may be best imparted by the family physician, who can be consulted for the purpose; and there is no reputable physician who will not undertake the task with both prudence and alacrity, while from such a source the words have an importance and authority which few parents can command. The boy's intercourse with his
