boys, large schools, and for those of the upper class, large boarding schools are a practical necessity. Then comes the dangerous time, and how great the dangers of that time are is well known to every one who has had an experience of the inner working of English public schools. To keep boys safe from a most perilous, if not fatal, contact with vice and sin, is a problem which has exercised the mind and troubled the conscience of every one who has taken part in the management of any of our large schools and colleges; and those among Protestant educators who have studied the subject most deeply, and who have had long experience to guide them, have had to admit, with sorrow and grief, that the task was a hopeless one.[1] They have had to submit to what they considered an inevitable evil, and their best hope has been by personal influence to mitigate to some extent that which they knew they were powerless to prevent. But is the evil one for which no remedy can be provided? God forbid! The Catholic Church provides an effective remedy for this as for every other evil incident to human life. Here I can speak from a large experience, and with a full knowledge of the subject. Again and again I have been assured by boys who have passed through Catholic colleges, from the lowest to the highest form, that during the whole of their time there they never heard one immodest word, or came into
- ↑ Compare with this the passage quoted by Arnold: "Public schools are the very seats and nurseries of vice. It may be unavoidable, or it may not, but the fact is indisputable. None can pass through a large school without being pretty intimately acquainted with vice, and few, alas! very few, without tasting too largely of that poisoned bowl." – Fitch, l. c., p. 77.
