“A public school, Joseph, was the cause of all the calamities which he afterwards suffered.  Public schools are the nurseries of all vice and immorality.  All the wicked fellows whom I remember at the University were bred at them....”

If boarding-school life with its close intimacies between boys from twelve to eighteen years of age were understood by English mothers, it is safe to say that every boarding-house in every school would disappear in a single night, and Eton, Harrow, Winchester and the rest would be turned into day-schools.

Those who have learned bad habits at school or in the ’Varsity are inclined to continue the practices in later life.  Naturally enough these men are usually distinguished by a certain artistic sympathy, and often by most attractive, intellectual qualities.  As a rule the epicene have soft voices and ingratiating manners, and are bold enough to make a direct appeal to the heart and emotions; they are considered the very cream of London society.

These admirers and supporters praised and defended Oscar Wilde from the beginning with the persistence and courage of men who if they don’t hang together are likely to hang separately.  After his trial and condemnation The Daily Telegraph spoke with contempt of these “decadents” and “aesthetes” who, it asserted, “could be numbered in London society on the fingers of one hand”; but even The Daily Telegraph must have known that in the “smart set” alone there are hundreds of these acolytes whose intellectual and artistic culture gives them an importance out of all proportion to their number.  It was the passionate support of these men in the first place which made Oscar Wilde notorious and successful.

This fact may well give pause to the thoughtful reader.  In the middle ages, when birth and position had a disproportionate power in life, the Catholic Church supplied a certain democratic corrective to the inequality of social conditions.  It was a sort of “Jacob’s Ladder” leading from the lowest strata of society to the very heavens and offering to ingenuous, youthful talent a career of infinite hope and unlimited ambition.  This great power of the Roman Church in the middle-ages may well be compared to the influence exerted by those whom I have designated as Oscar Wilde’s fuglemen in the England of today.  The easiest way to success in London society is to be notorious in this sense.  Whatever career one may have chosen, however humble one’s birth, one is then certain of finding distinguished friends and impassioned advocates.  If you happen to be in the army and unmarried, you are declared to be a strategist like Caesar, or an organizer like Moltke; if you are an artist, instead of having your faults proclaimed and your failings scourged, your qualifications are eulogised and you find yourself compared to Michel Angelo or Titian!  I would not willingly exaggerate here; but I could easily give dozens of instances to prove that sexual perversion is a “Jacob’s Ladder” to most forms of success in our time in London.