CHAPT. IV.-EARLY BETROTHALS. LONG ENGAGEMENTS.

In a work entitled "A Fraternal Address to Young Men," issued by the Young Man's Christian Association, early engagement is recommended. The author says, page 52: "Let the affections be engaged, and the prospect of marriage occupy the mind. If such betrothal be truthful and preserved in fidelity, many advantages beyond those already hinted at would be enjoyed."

This opinion has been entertained by many excellent men; but if we examine it from a medical point of view, it is very doubtful, to say no more, whether it is desirable for any youth, who has his way to make in the world, to attach himself to a girl early in life, however purely and faithfully. If an adult is in a position to marry, by all means let him do so. If his sexual desires are strong, and if his intellectual powers are not great, early marriage will keep him out of much mischief and temptation. All medical experience, however, proves that for any one, especially a young man, to enter into a long engagement without any immediate hope of fulfilling it, is, physically, an almost unmitigated evil. It is bad for any one to have sexual ideas and desires constantly before his mind, liable to be excited by every interview with the lady. The frequent correspondence, further, keeps up a morbid dwelling upon thoughts which it would be well to banish altogether from the mind; and I have reason to know that this condition of constant sexual excitement has often caused not only dangerously frequent and long-continued nocturnal emissions, but most painful affections of the testes. These results sometimes follow the progress of an ordinary two or three months' courtship to an alarming extent. The danger and distress may be much more serious when the marriage is postponed for years.

As this part of my work was passing through the press, I met with the following case, which is so exactly in point, that I quote it here:

The patient, a young Irish gentleman of good family, stated that he was engaged, but that the marriage would not take place for five months. The immediate cause of his coming to me was that he could not, he found, prevent himself from experiencing great sexual excitement as often as he saw the lady. As they lived near one another, they frequently met, and, without the smallest fault

on her part, his distress was often great. After leaving her, he was subject to frequent nocturnal emissions, and even while he was with her, pollutions would occur-sometimes repeatedly. This it was, which he considered had weakened him. Doubtless he had not been continent before. But whatever the cause, this state of things was to go on for some months. I could only recommend absence from the lady, and a strict watch over his feelings, but I am afraid with little avail.

Continence from all sexual excitement in thought and deed is my advice to all young men; and even the adult, who is not in a position to marry, had better direct his thoughts to sexual matters as little as possible. It is wiser for him to devote himself altogether to his profession, and not have to divide his attentions between his fiancée and his success in life. When the latter is attained, it will be time to think of the former-and he will be in a better position to select his partner for life.

Socially speaking, too, these long or early engagements often turn out badly. Hope deferred not only makes the heart sick, but the temper sour. Differences that the closer bond of marriage would have healed at once, or never allowed to arise, become permanent sources of disagreement, and very often the parties have to regret a youth that has been rendered less useful and less happy by an engagement which has at last to be broken off after much suffering, to the mutual relief of both.

PART II.

DISORDERS IN YOUTH.

CHAPT. I.-INCONTINENCE.

Ir is better, as has been already urged, frankly and sympathizingly to lay before a young man the whole difficulty, and at the same time the immense advantages of maintaining continence. Not less is it, I conceive, our duty to make him fully acquainted with the great temptations, and the ruinous consequences of incontinence. And here I would once more protest against giving a youth the smallest encouragement-much more against deliberately advising him-to commit fornication for the relief of his sexual feelings.

Nothing could ever induce me to take upon myself the responsibility of recommending illicit sexual intercourse. Setting aside. moral considerations, I feel fully convinced that no physiological or other motives can justify a medical man in suggesting or palliating the promiscuous or systematic breach of the seventh commandment.

The occasional indulgence of the sexual feelings is not, in the first place, medically desirable, as it stimulates, without satisfying, the appetite. And each casual intercourse, again, is attended with this danger: that it may but initiate a more permanent liaison, often fraught with painful consequences. If it once assume regularity, a man may form ties most difficult to break. The class of persons who accept his attentions on these terms without marriage, is beneath him in station and education. He finds himself presently in a false position. If the female is true to him alone, there is often great inducement to make her what in common parlance is called " an honest woman." Should a real marriage ensue, the ill-fated youth finds he has learnt too late a bitter lesson for the rest of his life. The requirements of society are such that men only can, or do virtually, visit at his house, even if his social position is good. His family may try to make the best of matters, but the well-educated female declines to forget the new-promoted wife's antecedents. The latter may sometimes merit much compassion, when, with every disposition to act well, she finds the entrance into good society closed against her. Her imperfect education unfits her for her new position; she pines away, becomes crosstempered; and those who have seen the interiors of such domestic establishments, know that marriages of this sort rarely turn out well, and that the husband is often the first to see the error of his ways.

When, on the contrary, the sensual young man is fortunate or shrewd enough to avoid the "permament liaison," and, wise, no doubt, in his own conceit, indulges his passions by promiscuous illicit intercourse, the day is not far off when he will contract disease-particularly in England, where the complaints of prostitutes are too little cared for.1

1 Those who wish to pursue this subject further, can refer to the author's work "On Prostitution," in which the dangers attending promiscuous intercourse are fully treated of.

The late Father Matthew knew his countrymen well, when he enjoined, not moderate indulgence, but total abstinence from spirituous liquors. So it is with the sexual passion. It is easier to abstain altogether, than to be occasionally incontinent and then continent. for a period. And the youth is a dreamer, who would open the floodgates of an ocean, and then attempt to prescribe at will a limit to the inundation.

That medical, or so-called scientific advice, that should recommend the commencement of a habit so dangerous is the most cruelly wicked, in my opinion, that can be given to a young man. It should be rather the medical man's object to impress upon his patient's inexperienced mind the simple truth, that instead of being a mere sexual indulgence, the consorting with prostitutes is one of the very worst sins, both in nature and result, which man can commit. His tone should rather be that adopted in the following extract from a celebrated article in the "Westminster Review :"

"Our morality will be considered by the divine as strangely lax and inconsistent, and by the men of the world, the ordinary thinker, and the mass who follow current ideas without thinking at all, as savage and absurd; nevertheless, we conceive it to harmonize with the ethics of nature and the dictates of unsophisticated sense. We look upon fornication, then (by which we always mean promiscuous intercourse with women who prostitute themselves for pay), as the worst and lowest form of sexual irregularity, the most revolting to the unpolluted feelings, the most indicative of a low nature, the most degrading and sapping to the loftier life,

The sin, of all, most sure to blight

The sin, of all, that the soul's light

Is soonest lost, extinguish'd in.'

Sexual indulgence, however guilty in its circumstances, however tragic in its results, is, when accompanied by love, a sin according to nature; its peculiarity and heinousness consist in its divorcing from all feelings of love that which was meant by nature as the last and intensest expression of passionate love; in its putting asunder that which God has joined; in its reducing the deepest gratification of unreserved affection to a mere momentary and brutal indulgence; in its making that only one of our appetites which is redeemed from mere animality by the hallowing influence of the better and tenderer feelings with which nature has connected it as animal as the rest. It is a voluntary exchange of the passionate love of a spiritual and intellectual being for the hunger and thirst of the beast. It is a profanation of that which the higher organization of man enables him to elevate and refine. It is the introduction of filth into the pure sanctuary of the affections. We have said that fornication reduces the most fervent expression of deep and devoted human love to a mere animal gratification. But it does more than this: it not only brings man down to a level with the brutes, but it has one feature which places him far, far below them. Sexual connection with them is the simple indulgence of a natural desire mutually felt; in the case of human prostitution, it is in many, probably in most, instances a

brutal desire on the one side only, and a reluctant and loathing submission, purchased by money, on the other. Among cattle the sexes meet by common instinct and a common will; it is reserved for the human animal to treat the female as a mere victim to his lust."1

To this eloquent writer's indignant remonstrance may we not add a still more disinterested witness-even the wicked old heathen Ovid?

"Sumite in exemplum pecudes ratione carentes

Turpe erit ingenium mitius esse feris.

Non equa munus equum, non taurum vacca poposcit
Non aries placitam munere captat ovem

Sola viro mulier spoliis exultat ademptis

Sola locat noctes; sola locanda venit.

Et vendit, quod utrumque juvat, quod uterque petebat
Et pretium, quanto gaudeat ipsa, facit."

Finally, therefore, it is my deliberate and earnest advice to all young men as well as boys, to live a perfectly continent life, in thought, word and deed. It is quite possible; and the means I have pointed out-regular training of the will, and careful attention to exercise and general hygienic training of the body-are, even apart from the greatest preservation of all-true religious feeling amply sufficient to attain this end.

To parents and guardians, I offer my equally earnest advice that they should make common cause with their charge, and by hearty sympathy and frank explanations of the true state of the case, aid them in maintaining a pure life. Much difference of opinion may exist on the conduct which parents and schoolmasters should pursue toward young boys in this matter, but there can be no question as to the injustice of allowing young men to remain in profound ignorance of all appertaining to sexual matters, except such as they may gather from experience-from vague and dirty conversation with each other, or with servants--or from that equivocal and unscientific information to be obtained from divorce cases and police reports. Perhaps few of my readers have considered the matter as I am now putting it; but they cannot fail to have observed the eagerness of young persons for this worse than useless kind of knowledge; and, at the risk of repeating myself, I would again urge that it is not right that their not unnatural craving can be only gratified by such often erroneous and piecemeal details. For want of more

1" West. Rev.," July, 1850.