SAFEGUARDS FOR STUDENTS.
By James White
Our beloved school has an excellent reputation wherever its influence is known and felt. The “Rules and Regulations,” as given on page 19, of the last number of the College paper, are rational and right. They are given to secure purity in the moral atmosphere within the school-room, and also without, wherever students may be, at their meals, in their rooms, or during their seasons of recreation. Those who do not cheerfully comply with these rules cannot be benefited to any great extent at our College, and the Board regard it a bad policy to retain such in the school at the risk of the moral injury of some unguarded and unsuspecting student, and of having the reputation of the school tarnished. The establishment and maintenance of that discipline in the school-room which secures universal good report is a noble work, a great victory. But it is a greater work to elevate the moral and religious standard in the community, and educate all those who should fully co-operate with teachers and members of the Board, so as to throw about the precious youth a complete safeguard. We bear joyful testimony to the important fact that unity of opinion and action exists with teachers and the members of the Board on the subject of discipline in the school, and in relation to that vigilance and prompt action sometimes necessary in breaking up those associations and influences which always depress the moral standard. In God we trust, and in his name we maintain the right. Those so unfortunate in their early training as to be pained with wholesome restraint, and long for a low level with disorderly spirits, will have to surrender their corrupted opinions to the teachers and the Board, or be entirely disconnected from those who hold connection with our precious school. We call attention to the following statements from the New England Journal of Education, under the caption, “The Outlook for Womanhood,” and pray God that it may never be our painful portion to take up such a lamentation over similar influences at our school:— In many of our communities, there is getting to be no small occasion for concern with reference to the future womanhood of our girls. They are thrown at the very outset into the very rabble of the mixed school. Little restraint is thrown about them in their association with the boys. Little proper girlhood guidance and instruction is given them. The text-book and the recitation are everything. The manners and the modesty of the girl are nothing. If she has been delicately guarded at home, she becomes half-hoiden. If nature or home-neglect has made her hoiden, she becomes brazen. In society and the home, foolish talk, and love-gossip or scandal; precocious petty novel-reading, and newspaper sensationalism with that crowning evil, unseasonable and insane child-parties, quicken into premature life the passion for beau-seeking, until the minikin miss and the monakin master must have their confidential notes and arm-in-arm promenades, à la Abelard and Heloise in disgusting miniature. Arrived at her greenest teens, the promiscuous intermingling of the evening party, and the corrupting familiarity of the kissing-bee; the undisguised pairing-off of the popular lecture and the evening service; the dancing-club, the evening promenade, and the night ride, make the false child-fancy a headstrong passion, that is alike regardless of parental restraint and womanly self-respect. As the result of all this premature association, and false sex-training, we see the girl, in her own practical estimation, nothing as a true, pure, self-sustained, home-blessing woman; but filled out complete, and for the first and only time, something, when she has a fellow at her side; and, as a natural consequence, without much regard to anything touching his education, character, position, and prospects; practically, everything being summed in his one sole virtue of being simply a male human animal. In our smaller communities, this is becoming so painfully common, that the modest, self-controlled young woman, at once the pride of the home, the pure influence in society, and the domestic foundation and hope for the future, is the exception, not the rule. And so we are fast swinging loose from the old Saxon anchorage of true domestic virtue, and drifting broadside into the over-mastering currents of mere Parisian frivolity and sex-dissipation. Now, we are no prudish conservatives or timid alarmists, when we urge that the times call for prompt and vigorous attention to the checking and correcting of this evil, by a proper womanly training of our girls. We cannot leave things to the general tone and drift of society, as might have been safely done under the old, but alas! now by-gone, staid, and chaste precaution and vigor of New England life and character. In the midst of over-growing laxity of manners, the multiplied stimulants to precocious passions, and the increasing facilities afforded by devilish art for the indulgence of illicit gratification, we cannot safely trust it to take care of itself. Observant fathers and sensible mothers are becoming painfully conscious of the growing evil, and alarmed for the prospective purity and happiness of their children, and the coming households. . . . Of all this,— “What shall the harvest be?”