If through straitened means you cannot afford an experienced nurse—­not that I should altogether allow that even the experienced nurse is to be implicitly and blindly trusted until she has been well tested—­then I would entreat you not to let sleepiness or ill health or any other excuse prevent you from being always present at your boy’s morning bath.  Often and often evil habits arise from imperfect washing and consequent irritation; and many a wise mother thinks it best on this account to revert to the old Jewish rite of initiation by which cleanliness was secured.  Teach them from the first self-reverence in touch, as in word and deed, and watch even their attitudes in sleep, that the little arms are folded lightly upwards.  Even experienced nurses are not always nice in their ways.  Be vigilantly watchful that the utmost niceness is observed between the boys and girls in the nursery, and that childish modesty is never broken down, but, on the contrary, nurtured and trained.  Knowledge and watchfulness are the two cherubim with the flaming sword turning all ways to guard the young tree of life and bar the way of every low and creeping thing.  If I may venture in some sort to reverse our Lord’s words, I should say His word to all mothers is, “What I say unto all I say especially unto you, Watch.”

But there is another and a deeper sense in which the root of the evil is first planted and nourished in the nursery.  If we are to contend with this deadly peril to soul and body, I cannot but feel that we must bring about a radical change in the training of our boys.  There must be some radical defect in that training for men to take the attitude they do.  I do not mean bad, dissipated men, but men who in all other relations of life would be designated fairly good men.  Once let such a man be persuaded—­however wrongly—­that his health, or his prospect of having some day a family of his own, will suffer from delayed marriage and he considers the question settled.  He will sacrifice his health to over-smoking, to excess in athletics, to over-eating or champagne drinking, to late hours and overwork; but to sacrifice health or future happiness to save a woman from degradation, bah! it never so much as enters his mind.  Even so high-minded a writer as Mr. Lecky, in his History of European Morals,[9] deliberately proposes that the difficulty of deferred marriage which advanced civilization necessitates, at least for the upper classes, should be met by temporary unions being permitted with a woman of a lower class.  The daughters of workingmen, according to this writer, are good enough as fleshly stop-gaps, to be flung aside when a sufficient income makes the true wife possible—­an honorable proceeding indeed! to say nothing of the children of such a temporary union, to whom the father can perform no duty, and leave no inheritance, save the inestimable one of a mother with a tainted name.  Verily there must be some fault in our training of