This is a matter which has not received sufficient attention in organizing boarding-schools for boys and girls, because it was not known that homosexual instincts are hereditary and innate. Such cases were regarded only as acquired bad habits.
Lunatic asylums are especially attractive to sexual inverts, who apply for the positions of attendants or nurse so as to be able to indulge their passions on the insane patients, who are incapable of betraying them.
Without being homosexual, nor even seduced by inverts, many normal but erotic individuals try to satisfy their sexual appetite on their companions—boys by pederasty, girls by lesbian love, and both sexes by mutual onanism.
The chief danger is that of some sexually perverted individual gaining entry to a boarding-school and contaminating numbers of normal individuals, without anything being discovered; because it is much more difficult to supervise a school than a family. This could be remedied better by confidence between masters and pupils than by supervision.
Varia.—I should never finish if I attempted to describe all the influences of environment. The examples mentioned will suffice to show that, in a natural appetite such as the sexual, the two extremes of asceticism and excess lead to evil and unnatural aberrations, and that the important point is to find or create a healthy environment for a healthy sexual life.
We hear a good deal about good or bad luck or chance in the matter of love. I do not deny that fortuitous circumstances often determine the happiness of an individual in his love affairs. But it is all the more deplorable that what is called the good manners of society make it so difficult to correct Cupid's blunders. There is room for improvement in this direction, and many spoilt lives and much unhappiness might be avoided. The unfavorable influence of environment might often be corrected by separation or change, if this could be done in time.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] Vide "Alkoholvergiftung und Degeneration" by Bunge: Leipzig 1904; and "Hygiene of the Nerves and Mind" by Forel: Stuttgart 1905.