"[A]n earlier generation of Britons succeeded in changing the character of their people and producing a diminution in the many forms of deviance that have reappeared and flourished in our own time, because they saw them as constituting not a social but a moral problem whose solution lay in the reform of personal conduct. One key agency in spreading and transmitting Gorer's "strict conscience and self-control" from being "a feature of a relatively small part of the population" to becoming "general throughout nearly the whole of society" was the Sunday school whose enrolments rose as the incidence of deviant behaviour fell in the late 19th century. Significantly, the numbers enrolled in and the influence of this institution then fell in the years prior to the reversal of the U-curve of deviance which has produced Britain's present high level of moral problems. There seems to be a clear inverse relationship between the rise and fall of the Sunday school...and the fall and rise of deviant behaviour."