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.