The first consideration is the influence exerted by social arrangements and tone of thought upon our boys and young men as they pass out of the family circle into the wider circles of the world, into school, college, business, society. What are the ideas about women that have been gradually formed in the mind of the lad of sixteen, by all that he has seen, heard, and read during his short but most important period of life? What opinions and habits, in relation to his own physical and moral nature, have been impressed upon him? How have our poorer classes of boys been trained in respect to their own well-being, and to association with girls of their own class? What has been the influence of the habits and companionships of that great middle-class multitude, clerks, shopkeepers, mechanics, farmers, soldiers, etc.? What books and newspapers do these boys read, what talk do they hear, what interests or amusements do they find in the theatre, the tavern, the streets, the home, and the church? What has been the training of the lad of the upper class—that class, small in number but great in influence, which, being lifted above any sordid pressure of material care, should be the spiritual leader of the classes below them—a class which has ten talents committed to it, and which inherits the grand old maxim, Noblesse oblige? How have all these lads been taught to regard womanhood and manhood? What is their standard of manliness? What habits of self-respect and of the noble uses of sex have been impressed upon their minds? Throughout all classes, abundant temptation to the abuse of sex exists. Increasing activity is displayed in the exercise of human ingenuity for the extension and refinement of vice. Shrewdness, large capital, business enterprise, are all enlisted in the lawless stimulation of this mighty instinct of sex. Immense provision is made for facilitating fornication; what direct efforts are made for encouraging chastity?
It is of vital importance to realize how small at present is the formative influence of the individual home and of the weekly discourse of the preacher, compared with the mighty social influences which spread with corrupting force around the great bulk of our youth. We find, as a matter of fact, that complete moral confusion too often meets the young man at the outset of life. Society presents him with no fixed standard of right or wrong in relation to sex, no clear ideal to be held steadily before him and striven for. Religious teaching points in one direction, but practical life points in quite a different way. The youth who has grown up from childhood under the guardianship of really wise parents, in a true home, with all its ennobling influences, and has been strengthened by enlightened religious instruction, has gradually grown towards the natural human type. He may have met the evils of life as they came to him from boyhood onwards, first of all with the blindness of innocence, which does not realize evil, and then with the repulsion of virtue, which is clear-sighted to the hideous results of vice. Such a one will either pass with healthy strength through life, or he may prove himself the grandest of heroes if beset with tremendous temptations; or, again, he may fall, after long and terrible struggles with his early virtue. But in the vast majority of cases the early training through innocence into virtue is wanting. Evil influences are at work unknown to or disregarded by the family, and a gradual process of moral and physical deterioration in the natural growth of sex corrupts the very young. In by far the larger ranks of life, before the lad has grown into the young man, his notions of right and wrong are too often obscured. He retains a vague notion that virtue is right, but as he perceives that his friends, his relations, his widening circle of acquaintance, live according to a different standard, his idea of virtue recedes into a vague abstraction, and he begins to think that vice is also right—in a certain way! He is too young to understand consequences, to realize the fearful chain of events in the ever-widening influence of evil acts—results which, if clearly seen, would frighten the innocent mind by the hideousness of evil, and make the first step towards it a crime. No one ventures to lift up a warning voice. The parent dares not, or knows not how to enter upon this subject of vital importance. There are no safeguards to his natural modesty; there is no wise help to strengthen his innocence into virtue.
Here is the testimony in relation to one important class, drawn from experience by our great English satirist: ‘And by the way, ye tender mothers and sober fathers of Christian families, a prodigious thing that theory of life is as orally learned at a great public school. Why, if you could hear those boys of fourteen, who blush before 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 he was twelve years old, and while his mother fancied him an angel of candour, little Pen had heard talk enough to make him quite awfully wise upon certain points; and so, madam, has your pretty little rosy-cheeked son, who is coming home from school for the ensuing Christmas holidays. I don’t say that the boy is lost, so that the innocence has left him which he had from “Heaven which is our home,” but the shades of the prison-house are closing very fast over him, and that we are helping as much as possible to corrupt him.’ ‘Few boys,’ says the Headmaster of a large school, ‘ever remain a month in any school, public or private, without learning all the salient points in the physical relation of the sexes. There are two grave evils in this unlicensed instruction: first, the lessons are learned surreptitiously; second, the knowledge is gained from the vicious experiences of the corrupted older boys, and the traditions handed down by them.’
Temptations meet the lad at every step. From childhood onward, an unnatural forcing process is at work, and he is too often mentally corrupted, whilst physically unformed. This mental condition tends to hasten the functions of adult life into premature activity. As already stated, an important period exists between the establishment of puberty and confirmed virility. In the unperverted youth, this space of time, marked by the rush of new life, is invaluable as a period for storing up the new forces needed to confirm young manhood and fit it for the healthy exercise of its important social functions. The very indications of Nature’s abundant forces at the outset of life, are warnings that this new force must not be stimulated, that there is danger of excessive and hasty growth in one direction, danger of hindering that gradual development which alone insures strength. If at an early age, thought and feeling have been set in the right direction, and aids to virtue and to health surround the young man, then this period of time, before his twenty-fifth year, will lead him into a strong and vigorous manhood. But where the mind is corrupted, the imagination heated, and no strong love of virtue planted in the soul, the individual loses the power of self-control, and becomes the victim of physical sensation and suggestion. When this condition of mental and physical deterioration has been produced, it is no longer possible for him to resist surrounding temptations. There are dangers within and without, but he does not recognise the danger. He is young, eager, filled with that excess of activity in blood and nerve, with which Nature always nourishes her fresh creative efforts.
At this important stage of life, when self-control, hygiene, mental and moral influence, are of vital importance, the fatal results of his weakened will and a corrupt society, ensue. Opportunity tempts his wavering innocence, thoughtless or vicious companions undertake to ‘form’ him, laugh at his scruples, sneer at his conscience, excite him with allurements. Or a deadly counsel meets him—meets him from those he is bound to respect. The most powerful morbid stimulant that exists—a stimulant to every drop of his seething young blood—is advised viz., the resort to prostitutes. When this fatal step has been taken, when the natural modesty of youth and the respect for womanhood is broken down, when he has broken with the restraints of family life, with the voice of Conscience, with the dictates of religion, a return to virtue is indeed difficult—nay, often impossible. He has tasted the physical delights of sex, separated from its more exquisite spiritual joys. This unnatural divorce degrades whilst it intoxicates him. Having tasted these physical pleasures, often he can no more do without them than the drunkard without his dram. He ignorantly tramples under foot his birthright of rich, compound, infinite human love, enthralled by the simple limited animal passion. His Will is no longer free. He has destroyed that grand endowment of Man, that freedom of the youthful Will, which is the priceless possession of innocence and of virtue, and has subjected himself to the slavery of lust. He is no longer his own master; he is the servant of his passions. Those whose interest it is to retain their victim employ every art of drink, of dress, of excess, to urge him on. The youthful eagerness of his own nature lends itself to these arts. The power of resistance is gradually lost, until one glance of a prostitute’s eye passing in the street, one token of allurement, will often overturn his best resolutions and outweigh the wisest counsel of friends! The physiological ignorance and moral blindness which actually lead some parents to provide a mistress for their sons, in the hope of keeping them from houses of public debauchery, is an effort as unavailing as it is corrupt. Place a youth on the wrong course instead of on the right one, lead him into the career of sensual indulgence and selfish disregard for womanhood instead of into manly self-control, and the parent has, by his own act, launched his child into the current of vice, which rapidly hurries him beyond his control.
The evils resulting from a violation of Nature’s method of growth by a life of early dissipation are both physical and mental or moral. In some organizations the former, in some the latter, are observable in the most marked degree; but no one can escape either the physical deterioration or the mental degradation which results from the irrational and unhuman exercise of the great endowment of sex.
Amongst the physical evils the following may be particularly noted. The loss of self-control, reacting upon the body, produces a morbid irritability (always a sign of weakness) which is a real disease, subjecting the individual to constant excitement and exhaustion from slight causes. The resulting physical evils may be slow in revealing themselves, because they only gradually undermine the constitution. They do not herald themselves in the alarming manner of a fever or a convulsion, but they are not to be less dreaded from their masked approach. The chief forms of physical deterioration are nervous exhaustion, impaired power of resistance to epidemics or other injurious influences, and the development of those germs of disease, or tendencies to some particular form of disease, which exist in the majority of constitutions. The brain and spinal marrow and the lungs are the vital organs most frequently injured by loose life. But whatever be the weak point of the constitution, from inherited or acquired morbid tendencies, that will probably be the point through which disease or death will enter.
One of the most distinguished hygienists of our age writes thus: ‘The pathological results of venereal excess are now well known. The gradual derangements of health experienced by its victims are not at first recognised by them, and physicians may take the symptoms to be the beginning of very different diseases. How often symptoms are considered as cases of hypochondria or chronic gastritis, or the commencement of heart disease, which are really the results of generative abuse! A general exhaustion of the whole physical force, symptoms of cerebral congestion, or paralysis, attributed to some cerebrospinal lesion, are often due to the same causes. The same may be said of some of the severest forms of insanity. Many cases of consumption appearing in young men who suffer from no hereditary tendency to the disease enter into the same category. So many diseases are vainly treated by medicine or regime which are really caused by abuse of these important functions.’[24] Another of our oldest surgeons writes: ‘Among the passions of the future man which at this period should be strictly restrained is that of physical love, for none wars so completely against the principles which have been already laid down as the most conducive to long life; no excess so thoroughly lessens the sum of the vital power, none so much weakens and softens the organs of life, none is more active in hastening vital consumption, and none so totally prohibits restoration. I might, if it were necessary, draw a painful—nay, a frightful—picture of the results of these melancholy excesses, etc.’[25] Volumes might be filled with similar medical testimony on the destructive character of early licentiousness.
Striking testimony to the destructive effects of vice in early manhood is derived from a very different source—viz., the strictly business calculation of the chances of life, furnished by Life Insurance Companies. These tables show the rapid fall in viability during the earlier years of adult life. Dr. Carpenter has reproduced a striking diagram[26] from the well-known statistician Quetelet, showing the comparative viability of men and women at different ages, and its rapid diminution in the male from the age of eighteen to twenty-five. He remarks: ‘The mortality is much greater in males from about the age of eighteen to twenty-eight, being at its maximum at twenty-five, when the viability is only half what it is at puberty. This fact is a very striking one, and shows most forcibly that the indulgence of the passions not only weakens the health, but in a great number of instances is the cause of a very premature death.’[27] Dr. Bertillon (a well-known French statistician) has shown by the statistics of several European countries that the irregularities of unmarried life produce disease, crime, and suicide; that the rate of mortality in bachelors of twenty-five is equal to that of married men at forty-five; that the immoral life of the unmarried and the widowed, whether male or female, ages them by twenty years and more.
Many of the foreign health resorts are filled with young men of the richer classes of society, seeking to restore the health destroyed by dissipation. Could the simple truth be recorded on the tombstones of multitudes of precious youth, from imperial families downward, who are mourned as victims of consumption, softening of the brain, etc., all lovers of the race would stand appalled at the endless record of these wasted lives. ‘Died from the effects of fornication’ would be the true warning voice from these premature graves.