A Treatise on Parents and Children - Sandroid.org

ContentsTrailing Clouds of Glory 1The Child is Father to the Man 5What is a Child? 9The Sin of Nadab and Abihu 13The Manufacture of Monsters 17Small and Large Families 21Children as Nuisances 23Child Fanciers 29Childhood as a State of Sin 33School 35My Scholastic Acquirements 41Schoolmasters of Genius 43What We Do Not Teach, and Why 49Taboo in Schools 53Alleged Novelties in Modern Schools 57i

iiChildren’s Rights and Duties 61Children’s Happiness 65The Horror of the Perpetual Holiday 67University Schoolboyishness 71The New Laziness 73The Infinite School Task 75The Rewards and Risks of Knowledge 79English Physical Hardihood and SpiritualCowardice 83The Risks of Ignorance and Weakness 85The Common Sense of Toleration 89The Sin of Athanasius 93The Experiment Experimenting 99Why We Loathe Learning and Love Sport 103Antichrist 107Under the Whip 111Technical Instruction 117Docility and Dependence 119The Abuse of Docility 123The Schoolboy and the Homeboy 127The Comings of Age of Children 131The Conflict of Wills 133

iiiThe Demagogue’s Opportunity 137Our Quarrelsomeness 139The Pursuit of Manners 145Not too much Wind on the Heath 149Wanted: a Child’s Magna Charta 153The Pursuit of Learning 155Children and Game: a Proposal 157The Parents’ Intolerable Burden 159Mobilization 163Children’s Rights and Parents’ Wrongs 167How Little We Know About Our Parents 171Our Abandoned Mothers 175Family Affection 177The Fate of the Family 183Family Mourning 187Art Teaching 189The Impossibility of Secular Education 199Natural Selection as a Religion 203Moral Instruction Leagues 205The Bible 211Artist Idolatry 215

ivThe Provocation to Anarchism 221Imagination 225Government by Bullies 229

PrefatoryMaterialsThis public-domain text was scanned andproofed by Ronald Burkey and Amy Thomte.It was subsequently converted to LaTex byGutenMark software, and then re-editedwith lyx software. If you find any errorsplease report them to info@birdsproject.org.Punctuation and spelling retained as inthe printed text. Shaw intentionally spelledmany words according to a non-standardsystem. For example, “dont” is given as“dont” (without apostrophe), “Dr.” is givenas “Dr” (without a period at the end), and“Shakespeare” is given as “Shakespear” (no“e” at the end).v

viA <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Children

Trailing Clouds ofGloryChildhood is a stage in the process of thatcontinual remanufacture of the Life Stuff bywhich the human race is perpetuated. TheLife Force either will not or cannot achieveimmortality except in very low organisms:indeed it is by no means ascertained thateven the amoeba is immortal. Human beingsvisibly wear out, though they last longerthan their friends the dogs. Turtles, parrots,and elephants are believed to be capable ofoutliving the memory of the oldest humaninhabitant. But the fact that new ones areborn conclusively proves that they are notimmortal. Do away with death and you doaway with the need for birth: in fact if youwent on breeding, you would finally have tokill old people to make room for young ones.Now death is not necessarily a failureof energy on the part of the Life Force.People with no imagination try to makethings which will last for ever, and even1

2 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenwant to live for ever themselves. But theintelligently imaginative man knows verywell that it is waste of labor to make amachine that will last ten years, becauseit will probably be superseded in half thattime by an improved machine answering thesame purpose. He also knows that if somedevil were to convince us that our dream ofpersonal immortality is no dream but a hardfact, such a shriek of despair would go upfrom the human race as no other conceivablehorror could provoke. With all our perversenonsense as to John Smith living for athousand million eons and for ever after, wedie voluntarily, knowing that it is time forus to be scrapped, to be remanufactured, tocome back, as Wordsworth divined, trailingever brightening clouds of glory. We mustall be born again, and yet again and again.We should like to live a little longer justas we should like 50 pounds: that is, weshould take it if we could get it for nothing;but that sort of idle liking is not will. It isamazing—considering the way we talk—howlittle a man will do to get 50 pounds: all the50-pound notes I have ever known of havebeen more easily earned than a laborioussixpence; but the difficulty of inducing aman to make any serious effort to obtain 50pounds is nothing to the difficulty of inducinghim to make a serious effort to keep alive.The moment he sees death approach, he gets

Trailing Clouds of Glory 3into bed and sends for a doctor. He knowsvery well at the back of his conscience thathe is rather a poor job and had better beremanufactured. He knows that his deathwill make room for a birth; and he hopesthat it will be a birth of something that heaspired to be and fell short of. He knowsthat it is through death and rebirth that thiscorruptible shall become incorruptible, andthis mortal put on immortality. Practise asyou will on his ignorance, his fears, and hisimagination, with bribes of paradises andthreats of hells, there is only one belief thatcan rob death of its sting and the grave ofits victory; and that is the belief that we canlay down the burden of our wretched littlemakeshift individualities for ever at each lifttowards the goal of evolution, which can onlybe a being that cannot be improved upon.After all, what man is capable of the insaneself-conceit of believing that an eternity ofhimself would be tolerable even to himself?Those who try to believe it postulate thatthey shall be made perfect first. But if youmake me perfect I shall no longer be myself,nor will it be possible for me to conceive mypresent imperfections (and what I cannotconceive I cannot remember); so that youmay just as well give me a new name andface the fact that I am a new person and thatthe old Bernard Shaw is as dead as mutton.Thus, oddly enough, the conventional belief

4 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenin the matter comes to this: that if you wishto live for ever you must be wicked enoughto be irretrievably damned, since the savedare no longer what they were, and in hellalone do people retain their sinful nature:that is to say, their individuality. And thissort of hell, however convenient as a meansof intimidating persons who have practicallyno honor and no conscience, is not a fact.Death is for many of us the gate of hell; butwe are inside on the way out, not outside onthe way in. Therefore let us give up tellingone another idle stories, and rejoice in deathas we rejoice in birth; for without death wecannot be born again; and the man who doesnot wish to be born again and born betteris fit only to represent the City of Londonin Parliament, or perhaps the university ofOxford.

The Child is Fatherto the ManIs he? Then in the name of common sense whydo we always treat children on the assumptionthat the man is father to the child? Oh,these fathers! And we are not content withfathers: we must have godfathers, forgettingthat the child is godfather to the man. Hasit ever struck you as curious that in a countrywhere the first article of belief is that everychild is born with a godfather whom weall call “our father which art in heaven,” twovery limited individual mortals should be allowedto appear at its baptism and explainthat they are its godparents, and that theywill look after its salvation until it is no longera child. I had a godmother who made herselfresponsible in this way for me. She presentedme with a Bible with a gilt clasp and edges,larger than the Bibles similarly presented tomy sisters, because my sex entitled me to aheavier article. I must have seen that lady atleast four times in the twenty years following.5

6 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and ChildrenShe never alluded to my salvation in any way.People occasionally ask me to act as godfatherto their children with a levity which convincesme that they have not the faintest notionthat it involves anything more than callingthe helpless child George Bernard withoutregard to the possibility that it may grow upin the liveliest abhorrence of my notions.A person with a turn for logic might arguethat if God is the Father of all men, andif the child is father to the man, it followsthat the true representative of God at thechristening is the child itself. But suchposers are unpopular, because they implythat our little customs, or, as we often callthem, our religion, mean something, or mustoriginally have meant something, and thatwe understand and believe that something.However, my business is not to makeconfusion worse confounded, but to clear itup. Only, it is as well to begin by a sample ofcurrent thought and practice which shewsthat on the subject of children we are verydeeply confused. On the whole, whateverour theory or no theory may be, our practiceis to treat the child as the property of itsimmediate physical parents, and to allowthem to do what they like with it as far asit will let them. It has no rights and noliberties: in short, its condition is that whichadults recognize as the most miserable anddangerous politically possible for themselves:

The Child is Father to the Man 7namely, the condition of slavery. For itsalleviation we trust to the natural affectionof the parties, and to public opinion. Afather cannot for his own credit let his songo in rags. Also, in a very large sectionof the population, parents finally becomedependent on their children. Thus thereare checks on child slavery which do notexist, or are less powerful, in the case ofmanual and industrial slavery. Sensationallybad cases fall into two classes, which arereally the same class: namely, the childrenwhose parents are excessively addicted tothe sensual luxury of petting children, andthe children whose parents are excessivelyaddicted to the sensual luxury of physicallytorturing them. There is a Society for thePrevention of Cruelty to Children which haseffectually made an end of our belief thatmothers are any more to be trusted thanstepmothers, or fathers than slave-drivers.And there is a growing body of law designedto prevent parents from using their childrenruthlessly to make money for the household.Such legislation has always been furiouslyresisted by the parents, even when thehorrors of factory slavery were at theirworst; and the extension of such legislationat present would be impossible if it werenot that the parents affected by it cannotcontrol a majority of votes in Parliament. Indomestic life a great deal of service is done

8 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenby children, the girls acting as nursemaidsand general servants, and the lads as errandboys. In the country both boys and girls doa substantial share of farm labor. This iswhy it is necessary to coerce poor parents tosend their children to school, though in therelatively small class which keeps plenty ofservants it is impossible to induce parents tokeep their children at home instead of payingschoolmasters to take them off their hands.It appears then that the bond of affectionbetween parents and children does not savechildren from the slavery that denial ofrights involves in adult political relations. Itsometimes intensifies it, sometimes mitigatesit; but on the whole children and parentsconfront one another as two classes in whichall the political power is on one side; and theresults are not at all unlike what they wouldbe if there were no immediate consanguinitybetween them, and one were white and theother black, or one enfranchised and theother disenfranchised, or one ranked asgentle and the other simple. Not that Naturecounts for nothing in the case and politicalrights for everything. But a denial of politicalrights, and the resultant delivery of one classinto the mastery of another, affects theirrelations so extensively and profoundly thatit is impossible to ascertain what the realnatural relations of the two classes are untilthis political relation is abolished.

What is a Child?An experiment. A fresh attempt to producethe just man made perfect: that is, to makehumanity divine. And you will vitiate theexperiment if you make the slightest attemptto abort it into some fancy figure of yourown: for example, your notion of a good manor a womanly woman. If you treat it as alittle wild beast to be tamed, or as a petto be played with, or even as a means tosave you trouble and to make money foryou (and these are our commonest ways),it may fight its way through in spite of youand save its soul alive; for all its instinctswill resist you, and possibly be strengthenedin the resistance; but if you begin with itsown holiest aspirations, and suborn them foryour own purposes, then there is hardly anylimit to the mischief you may do. Swear at achild, throw your boots at it, send it flyingfrom the room with a cuff or a kick; and theexperience will be as instructive to the childas a difficulty with a short-tempered dog ora bull. Francis Place tells us that his father9

10 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenalways struck his children when he found onewithin his reach. The effect on the youngPlaces seems to have been simply to makethem keep out of their father’s way, whichwas no doubt what he desired, as far as hedesired anything at all. Francis records thehabit without bitterness, having reason tothank his stars that his father respected theinside of his head whilst cuffing the outsideof it; and this made it easy for Francis todo yeoman’s service to his country as thatrare and admirable thing, a Freethinker: theonly sort of thinker, I may remark, whosethoughts, and consequently whose religiousconvictions, command any respect.Now Mr Place, senior, would be describedby many as a bad father; and I do not contendthat he was a conspicuously good one. But ascompared with the conventional good fatherwho deliberately imposes himself on his sonas a god; who takes advantage of childishcredulity and parent worship to persuadehis son that what he approves of is rightand what he disapproves of is wrong; whoimposes a corresponding conduct on the childby a system of prohibitions and penalties,rewards and eulogies, for which he claimsdivine sanction: compared to this sort ofabortionist and monster maker, I say, Placeappears almost as a Providence. Not that it ispossible to live with children any more thanwith grown-up people without imposing rules

What is a Child? 11of conduct on them. There is a point at whichevery person with human nerves has to sayto a child “Stop that noise.” But suppose thechild asks why! There are various answersin use. The simplest: “Because it irritatesme,” may fail; for it may strike the child asbeing rather amusing to irritate you; alsothe child, having comparatively no nerves,may be unable to conceive your meaningvividly enough. In any case it may wantto make a noise more than to spare yourfeelings. You may therefore have to explainthat the effect of the irritation will be thatyou will do something unpleasant if thenoise continues. The something unpleasantmay be only a look of suffering to rouse thechild’s affectionate sympathy (if it has any),or it may run to forcible expulsion from theroom with plenty of unnecessary violence;but the principle is the same: there are nofalse pretences involved: the child learns in astraightforward way that it does not pay to beinconsiderate. Also, perhaps, that Mamma,who made the child learn the Sermon on theMount, is not really a Christian.

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The Sin of Nadaband AbihuBut there is another sort of answer inwide use which is neither straightforward,instructive, nor harmless. In its simplestform it substitutes for “Stop that noise,”“Dont be naughty,” which means that thechild, instead of annoying you by a perfectlyhealthy and natural infantile procedure,is offending God. This is a blasphemouslie; and the fact that it is on the lips ofevery nurserymaid does not excuse it in theleast. Dickens tells us of a nurserymaid whoelaborated it into “If you do that, angels wontnever love you.” I remember a servant whoused to tell me that if I were not good, bywhich she meant if I did not behave with asingle eye to her personal convenience, thecock would come down the chimney. Lessimaginative but equally dishonest people toldme I should go to hell if I did not make myselfagreeable to them. Bodily violence, providedit be the hasty expression of normal provoked13

14 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenresentment and not vicious cruelty, cannotharm a child as this sort of pious fraudharms it. There is a legal limit to physicalcruelty; and there are also human limits toit. There is an active Society which brings tobook a good many parents who starve andtorture and overwork their children, andintimidates a good many more. When parentsof this type are caught, they are treated ascriminals; and not infrequently the policehave some trouble to save them from beinglynched. The people against whom childrenare wholly unprotected are those who devotethemselves to the very mischievous and cruelsort of abortion which is called bringing up achild in the way it should go. Now nobodyknows the way a child should go. All theways discovered so far lead to the horrorsof our existing civilizations, described quitejustifiably by Ruskin as heaps of agonizinghuman maggots, struggling with one anotherfor scraps of food. Pious fraud is an attemptto pervert that precious and sacred thing thechild’s conscience into an instrument of ourown convenience, and to use that wonderfuland terrible power called Shame to grind ourown axe. It is the sin of stealing fire fromthe altar: a sin so impudently practised bypopes, parents, and pédagogues, that one canhardly expect the nurserymaids to see anyharm in stealing a few cinders when they areworrited.

The Sin of Nadab and Abihu 15Into the blackest depths of this violation ofchildren’s souls one can hardly bear to look;for here we find pious fraud masking the violationof the body by obscene cruelty. Any parentor school teacher who takes a secret andabominable delight in torture is allowed to laytraps into which every child must fall, andthen beat it to his or her heart’s content. Agentleman once wrote to me and said, with anobvious conviction that he was being most reasonableand high minded, that the only thinghe beat his children for was failure in perfectobedience and perfect truthfulness. On theseattributes, he said, he must insist. As one ofthem is not a virtue at all, and the other isthe attribute of a god, one can imagine whatthe lives of this gentleman’s children wouldhave been if it had been possible for him tolive down to his monstrous and foolish pretensions.And yet he might have written hisletter to The Times (he very nearly did, bythe way) without incurring any danger of beingremoved to an asylum, or even losing hisreputation for taking a very proper view ofhis parental duties. And at least it was nota trivial view, nor an ill meant one. It wasmuch more respectable than the general consensusof opinion that if a school teacher candevise a question a child cannot answer, oroverhear it calling omega omeega, he or shemay beat the child viciously. Only, the crueltymust be whitewashed by a moral excuse,

16 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenand a pretence of reluctance. It must be forthe child’s good. The assailant must say “Thishurts me more than it hurts you.” There mustbe hypocrisy as well as cruelty. The injury tothe child would be far less if the voluptuarysaid frankly “I beat you because I like beatingyou; and I shall do it whenever I can contrivean excuse for it.” But to represent thisdetestable lust to the child as Divine wrath,and the cruelty as the beneficent act of God,which is exactly what all our floggers do, is toadd to the torture of the body, out of which theflogger at least gets some pleasure, the maimingand blinding of the child’s soul, which canbring nothing but horror to anyone.

The Manufactureof MonstersThis industry is by no means peculiarto China. The Chinese (they say) makephysical monsters. We revile them for itand proceed to make moral monsters of ourown children. The most excusable parentsare those who try to correct their own faultsin their offspring. The parent who says tohis child: “I am one of the successes of theAlmighty: therefore imitate me in everyparticular or I will have the skin off yourback” (a quite common attitude) is a muchmore absurd figure than the man who, witha pipe in his mouth, thrashes his boy forsmoking. If you must hold yourself up to yourchildren as an object lesson (which is not atall necessary), hold yourself up as a warningand not as an example. But you had muchbetter let the child’s character alone. If youonce allow yourself to regard a child as somuch material for you to manufacture intoany shape that happens to suit your fancy17

18 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenyou are defeating the experiment of the LifeForce. You are assuming that the child doesnot know its own business, and that you do.In this you are sure to be wrong: the childfeels the drive of the Life Force (often calledthe Will of God); and you cannot feel it forhim. Handel’s parents no doubt thought theyknew better than their child when they triedto prevent his becoming a musician. Theywould have been equally wrong and equallyunsuccessful if they had tried to prevent thechild becoming a great rascal had its geniuslain in that direction. Handel would havebeen Handel, and Napoleon and Peter ofRussia themselves in spite of all the parentsin creation, because, as often happens, theywere stronger than their parents. But thisdoes not happen always. Most children canbe, and many are, hopelessly warped andwasted by parents who are ignorant and sillyenough to suppose that they know what ahuman being ought to be, and who stick atnothing in their determination to force theirchildren into their moulds. Every child hasa right to its own bent. It has a right to bea Plymouth Brother though its parents beconvinced atheists. It has a right to dislike itsmother or father or sister or brother or uncleor aunt if they are antipathetic to it. It has aright to find its own way and go its own way,whether that way seems wise or foolish toothers, exactly as an adult has. It has a right

The Manufacture of Monsters 19to privacy as to its own doings and its ownaffairs as much as if it were its own father.

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Small and LargeFamiliesThese rights have now become moreimportant than they used to be, becausethe modern practice of limiting familiesenables them to be more effectually violated.In a family of ten, eight, six, or even fourchildren, the rights of the younger onesto a great extent take care of themselvesand of the rights of the elder ones too. Twoadult parents, in spite of a house to keepand an income to earn, can still interfereto a disastrous extent with the rights andliberties of one child. But by the time afourth child has arrived, they are not onlyoutnumbered two to one, but are gettingtired of the thankless and mischievous job ofbringing up their children in the way theythink they should go. The old observationthat members of large families get on in theworld holds good because in large families itis impossible for each child to receive whatschoolmasters call “individual attention.” The21

22 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenchildren may receive a good deal of individualattention from one another in the shapeof outspoken reproach, ruthless ridicule,and violent resistance to their attempts ataggression; but the parental despots arecompelled by the multitude of their subjectsto resort to political rather than personalrule, and to spread their attempts at moralmonster-making over so many children, thateach child has enough freedom, and enoughsport in the prophylactic process of laughingat its elders behind their backs, to escapewith much less damage than the single child.In a large school the system may be bad; butthe personal influence of the head masterhas to be exerted, when it is exerted at all,in a public way, because he has little morepower of working on the affections of theindividual scholar in the intimate way that,for example, the mother of a single child can,than the prime minister has of working onthe affections of any individual voter.

Children asNuisancesExperienced parents, when children’s rightsare preached to them, very naturally askwhether children are to be allowed to do whatthey like. The best reply is to ask whetheradults are to be allowed to do what theylike. The two cases are the same. The adultwho is nasty is not allowed to do what helikes: neither can the child who likes to benasty. There is no difference in principlebetween the rights of a child and those of anadult: the difference in their cases is one ofcircumstance. An adult is not supposed to bepunished except by process of law; nor, whenhe is so punished, is the person whom hehas injured allowed to act as judge, jury, andexecutioner. It is true that employers do actin this way every day to their workpeople; butthis is not a justified and intended part of thesituation: it is an abuse of Capitalism whichnobody defends in principle. As between childand parent or nurse it is not argued about23

24 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenbecause it is inevitable. You cannot holdan impartial judicial inquiry every time achild misbehaves itself. To allow the childto misbehave without instantly making itunpleasantly conscious of the fact would beto spoil it. The adult has therefore to takeaction of some sort with nothing but hisconscience to shield the child from injusticeor unkindness. The action may be a torrentof scolding culminating in a furious smackcausing terror and pain, or it may be aremonstrance causing remorse, or it may be asarcasm causing shame and humiliation, or itmay be a sermon causing the child to believethat it is a little reprobate on the road to hell.The child has no defence in any case exceptthe kindness and conscience of the adult; andthe adult had better not forget this; for itinvolves a heavy responsibility.And now comes our difficulty. The responsibility,being so heavy, cannot be dischargedby persons of feeble character or intelligence.And yet people of high character and intelligencecannot be plagued with the care of children.A child is a restless, noisy little animal,with an insatiable appetite for knowledge,and consequently a maddening persistencein asking questions. If the child is to remainin the room with a highly intelligent andsensitive adult, it must be told, and if necessaryforced, to sit still and not speak, whichis injurious to its health, unnatural, unjust,

Children as Nuisances 25and therefore cruel and selfish beyond toleration.Consequently the highly intelligent andsensitive adult hands the child over to a nurserymaidwho has no nerves and can thereforestand more noise, but who has also no scruples,and may therefore be very bad companyfor the child.Here we have come to the central fact ofthe question: a fact nobody avows, which isyet the true explanation of the monstroussystem of child imprisonment and torturewhich we disguise under such hypocrisies aseducation, training, formation of characterand the rest of it. This fact is simply thata child is a nuisance to a grown-up person.What is more, the nuisance becomes moreand more intolerable as the grown-up personbecomes more cultivated, more sensitive, andmore deeply engaged in the highest methodsof adult work. The child at play is noisyand ought to be noisy: Sir Isaac Newton atwork is quiet and ought to be quiet. Andthe child should spend most of its time atplay, whilst the adult should spend most ofhis time at work. I am not now writing onbehalf of persons who coddle themselves intoa ridiculous condition of nervous feebleness,and at last imagine themselves unable towork under conditions of bustle which tohealthy people are cheerful and stimulating.I am sure that if people had to choosebetween living where the noise of children

26 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrennever stopped and where it was never heard,all the goodnatured and sound people wouldprefer the incessant noise to the incessantsilence. But that choice is not thrust upon usby the nature of things. There is no reasonwhy children and adults should not seejust as much of one another as is good forthem, no more and no less. Even at presentyou are not compelled to choose betweensending your child to a boarding school(which means getting rid of it altogetheron more or less hypocritical pretences) andkeeping it continually at home. Most workingfolk today either send their children to dayschools or turn them out of doors. This solvesthe problem for the parents. It does notsolve it for the children, any more than thetethering of a goat in a field or the chasing ofan unlicensed dog into the streets solves it forthe goat or the dog; but it shews that in noclass are people willing to endure the societyof their children, and consequently that it isan error to believe that the family provideschildren with edifying adult society, or thatthe family is a social unit. The family is inthat, as in so many other respects, a humbug.Old people and young people cannot walk atthe same pace without distress and final lossof health to one of the parties. When theyare sitting indoors they cannot endure thesame degrees of temperature and the samesupplies of fresh air. Even if the main factors

Children as Nuisances 27of noise, restlessness, and inquisitivenessare left out of account, children can standwith indifference sights, sounds, smells,and disorders that would make an adult offifty utterly miserable; whilst on the otherhand such adults find a tranquil happinessin conditions which to children meanunspeakable boredom. And since our systemis nevertheless to pack them all into thesame house and pretend that they are happy,and that this particular sort of happinessis the foundation of virtue, it is found thatin discussing family life we never speak ofactual adults or actual children, or of realitiesof any sort, but always of ideals such as TheHome, a Mother’s Influence, a Father’s Care,Filial Piety, Duty, Affection, Family Life,etc. etc., which are no doubt very comfortingphrases, but which beg the question ofwhat a home and a mother’s influence anda father’s care and so forth really come toin practice. How many hours a week of thetime when his children are out of bed doesthe ordinary bread-winning father spend inthe company of his children or even in thesame building with them? The home may bea thieves’ kitchen, the mother a procuress,the father a violent drunkard; or the motherand father may be fashionable people whosee their children three or four times a yearduring the holidays, and then not oftenerthan they can help, living meanwhile in daily

28 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenand intimate contact with their valets andlady’s-maids, whose influence and care areoften dominant in the household. Affection,as distinguished from simple kindliness,may or may not exist: when it does it eitherdepends on qualities in the parties thatwould produce it equally if they were of nokin to one another, or it is a more or lessmorbid survival of the nursing passion; foraffection between adults (if they are reallyadult in mind and not merely grown-upchildren) and creatures so relatively selfishand cruel as children necessarily are withoutknowing it or meaning it, cannot be callednatural: in fact the evidence shews that it iseasier to love the company of a dog than of acommonplace child between the ages of sixand the beginnings of controlled maturity; forwomen who cannot bear to be separated fromtheir pet dogs send their children to boardingschools cheerfully. They may say and evenbelieve that in allowing their children toleave home they are sacrificing themselvesfor their children’s good; but there are veryfew pet dogs who would not be the betterfor a month or two spent elsewhere than ina lady’s lap or roasting on a drawingroomhearthrug. Besides, to allege that childrenare better continually away from home is togive up the whole popular sentimental theoryof the family; yet the dogs are kept and thechildren are banished.

Child FanciersThere is, however, a good deal of spuriousfamily affection. There is the clannishnessthat will make a dozen brothers and sisterswho quarrel furiously among themselvesclose up their ranks and make common causeagainst a brother-in-law or a sister-in-law.And there is a strong sense of property inchildren, which often makes mothers andfathers bitterly jealous of allowing anyoneelse to interfere with their children, whomthey may none the less treat very badly.And there is an extremely dangerous crazefor children which leads certain peopleto establish orphanages and baby farmsand schools, seizing any pretext for fillingtheir houses with children exactly as someeccentric old ladies and gentlemen fill theirswith cats. In such places the children are thevictims of all the caprices of doting affectionand all the excesses of lascivious cruelty. Yetthe people who have this morbid craze seldomhave any difficulty in finding victims. Parentsand guardians are so worried by children and29

30 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenso anxious to get rid of them that anyonewho is willing to take them off their hands iswelcomed and whitewashed. The very peoplewho read with indignation of Squeers andCreakle in the novels of Dickens are quiteready to hand over their own children toSqueers and Creakle, and to pretend thatSqueers and Creakle are monsters of thepast. But read the autobiography of Stanleythe traveller, or sit in the company of mentalking about their school-days, and youwill soon find that fiction, which must, if itis to be sold and read, stop short of beingpositively sickening, dare not tell the wholetruth about the people to whom children arehanded over on educational pretexts. Notvery long ago a schoolmaster in Ireland wasmurdered by his boys; and for reasons whichwere never made public it was at first decidednot to prosecute the murderers. Yet all theseflogging schoolmasters and orphanage fiendsand baby farmers are “lovers of children.”They are really child fanciers (like birdfanciers or dog fanciers) by irresistiblenatural predilection, never happy unless theyare surrounded by their victims, and alwayscertain to make their living by accepting thecustody of children, no matter how manyalternative occupations may be available.And bear in mind that they are only theextreme instances of what is commonly callednatural affection, apparently because it is

Child Fanciers 31obviously unnatural.The really natural feeling of adults for childrenin the long prosaic intervals between themoments of affectionate impulse is just thatfeeling that leads them to avoid their care andconstant company as a burden beyond bearing,and to pretend that the places they sendthem to are well conducted, beneficial, and indispensableto the success of the children inafter life. The true cry of the kind motherafter her little rosary of kisses is “Run away,darling.” It is nicer than “Hold your noise, youyoung devil; or it will be the worse for you”;but fundamentally it means the same thing:that if you compel an adult and a child to livein one another’s company either the adult orthe child will be miserable. There is nothingwhatever unnatural or wrong or shocking inthis fact; and there is no harm in it if only it besensibly faced and provided for. The mischiefthat it does at present is produced by our effortsto ignore it, or to smother it under a heapof sentimental lies and false pretences.

32 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Children

Childhood as aState of SinUnfortunately all this nonsense tends toaccumulate as we become more sympathetic.In many families it is still the custom totreat childhood frankly as a state of sin, andimpudently proclaim the monstrous principlethat little children should be seen and notheard, and to enforce a set of prison rulesdesigned solely to make cohabitation withchildren as convenient as possible for adultswithout the smallest regard for the interests,either remote or immediate, of the children.This system tends to produce a tough, ratherbrutal, stupid, unscrupulous class, with afixed idea that all enjoyment consists inundetected sinning; and in certain phasesof civilization people of this kind are apt toget the upper hand of more amiable andconscientious races and classes. They havethe ferocity of a chained dog, and are proud ofit. But the end of it is that they are alwaysin chains, even at the height of their military33

34 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenor political success: they win everything oncondition that they are afraid to enjoy it.Their civilizations rest on intimidation, whichis so necessary to them that when they cannotfind anybody brave enough to intimidatethem they intimidate themselves and live ina continual moral and political panic. In theend they get found out and bullied. But thatis not the point that concerns us here, whichis, that they are in some respects betterbrought up than the children of sentimentalpeople who are always anxious and miserableabout their duty to their children, and whoend by neither making their children happynor having a tolerable life for themselves.A selfish tyrant you know where to have,and he (or she) at least does not confuseyour affections; but a conscientious andkindly meddler may literally worry you outof your senses. It is fortunate that only veryfew parents are capable of doing what theyconceive their duty continuously or even atall, and that still fewer are tough enough toride roughshod over their children at home.

SchoolBut please observe the limitation “at home.”What private amateur parental enterprisecannot do may be done very effectively byorganized professional enterprise in largeinstitutions established for the purpose. Andit is to such professional enterprise thatparents hand over their children when theycan afford it. They send their children toschool; and there is, on the whole, nothing onearth intended for innocent people so horribleas a school. To begin with, it is a prison.But it is in some respects more cruel than aprison. In a prison, for instance, you are notforced to read books written by the wardersand the governor (who of course would notbe warders and governors if they could writereadable books), and beaten or otherwisetormented if you cannot remember theirutterly unmemorable contents. In the prisonyou are not forced to sit listening to turnkeysdiscoursing without charm or interest onsubjects that they dont understand and dontcare about, and are therefore incapable of35

School 37your childish hatred of your gaoler andflogger is nothing to his adult hatred ofyou; for he is a slave forced to endure yoursociety for his daily bread. You have noteven the satisfaction of knowing how youare torturing him and how he loathes you;and you give yourself unnecessary pains toannoy him with furtive tricks and spitefuldoing of forbidden things. No wonder he issometimes provoked to fiendish outburstsof wrath. No wonder men of downrightsense, like Dr Johnson, admit that undersuch circumstances children will not learnanything unless they are so cruelly beatenthat they make desperate efforts to memorizewords and phrases to escape flagellation. It isa ghastly business, quite beyond words, thisschooling.And now I hear cries of protest arisingall round. First my own schoolmasters, ortheir ghosts, asking whether I was cruellybeaten at school? No; but then I did notlearn anything at school. Dr Johnson’sschoolmaster presumably did care enoughwhether Sam learned anything to beathim savagely enough to force him to lamehis mind—for Johnson’s great mind waslamed—by learning his lessons. None ofmy schoolmasters really cared a rap (orperhaps it would be fairer to them to saythat their employers did not care a rap andtherefore did not give them the necessary

38 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrencaning powers) whether I learnt my lessonsor not, provided my father paid my schoolingbill, the collection of which was the realobject of the school. Consequently I did notlearn my school lessons, having much moreimportant ones in hand, with the resultthat I have not wasted my life trifling withliterary fools in taverns as Johnson didwhen he should have been shaking Englandwith the thunder of his spirit. My schoolingdid me a great deal of harm and no goodwhatever: it was simply dragging a child’ssoul through the dirt; but I escaped Squeersand Creakle just as I escaped Johnson andCarlyle. And this is what happens to mostof us. We are not effectively coerced tolearn: we stave off punishment as far aswe can by lying and trickery and guessingand using our wits; and when this does notsuffice we scribble impositions, or suffer extraimprisonments—“keeping in” was the phrasein my time—or let a master strike us with acane and fall back on our pride at being ableto hear it physically (he not being allowed tohit us too hard) to outface the dishonor weshould have been taught to die rather thanendure. And so idleness and worthlessnesson the one hand and a pretence of coercionon the other became a despicable routine. Ifmy schoolmasters had been really engaged ineducating me instead of painfully earningtheir bread by keeping me from annoying

School 39my elders they would have turned me out ofthe school, telling me that I was thoroughlydisloyal to it; that I had no intention oflearning; that I was mocking and distractingthe boys who did wish to learn; that I wasa liar and a shirker and a seditious littlenuisance; and that nothing could injure me incharacter and degrade their occupation morethan allowing me (much less forcing me) toremain in the school under such conditions.But in order to get expelled, it was necessarycommit a crime of such atrocity that theparents of other boys would have threatenedto remove their sons sooner than allow themto be schoolfellows with the delinquent. Ican remember only one case in which such apenalty was threatened; and in that case theculprit, a boarder, had kissed a housemaid,or possibly, being a handsome youth, beenkissed by her. She did not kiss me; andnobody ever dreamt of expelling me. Thetruth was, a boy meant just so much a yearto the institution. That was why he was keptthere against his will. That was why he waskept there when his expulsion would havebeen an unspeakable relief and benefit bothto his teachers and himself.It may be argued that if the uncommercialattitude had been taken, and all the disloyalwasters and idlers shewn sternly to thedoor, the school would not have been emptied,but filled. But so honest an attitude was im-

40 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenpossible. The masters must have hated theschool much more than the boys did. Just asyou cannot imprison a man without imprisoninga warder to see that he does not escape,the warder being tied to the prison as effectuallyby the fear of unemployment and starvationas the prisoner is by the bolts and bars,so these poor schoolmasters, with their smallsalaries and large classes, were as much prisonersas we were, and much more responsibleand anxious ones. They could not impose theheroic attitude on their employers; nor wouldthey have been able to obtain places as schoolmastersif their habits had been heroic. Forthe best of them their employment was provisional:they looked forward to escaping from itinto the pulpit. The ablest and most impatientof them were often so irritated by the awkward,slow-witted, slovenly boys: that is, theones that required special consideration andpatient treatment, that they vented their irritationon them ruthlessly, nothing being easierthan to entrap or bewilder such a boy intogiving a pretext for punishing him.

My ScholasticAcquirementsThe results, as far as I was concerned, werewhat might have been expected. My schoolmade only the thinnest pretence of teachinganything but Latin and Greek. When I wentthere as a very small boy I knew a good dealof Latin grammar which I had been taught ina few weeks privately by my uncle. When Ihad been several years at school this sameuncle examined me and discovered that thenet result of my schooling was that I hadforgotten what he had taught me, and hadlearnt nothing else. To this day, though I canstill decline a Latin noun and repeat someof the old paradigms in the old meaninglessway, because their rhythm sticks to me, Ihave never yet seen a Latin inscription on atomb that I could translate throughout. OfGreek I can decipher perhaps the greaterpart of the Greek alphabet. In short, I am, asto classical education, another Shakespear.I can read French as easily as English;41

42 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenand under pressure of necessity I can turnto account some scraps of German and alittle operatic Italian; but these I was nevertaught at school. Instead, I was taught lying,dishonorable submission to tyranny, dirtystories, a blasphemous habit of treating loveand maternity as obscene jokes, hopelessness,evasion, derision, cowardice, and all theblackguard’s shifts by which the cowardintimidates other cowards. And if I had beena boarder at an English public school insteadof a day boy at an Irish one, I might have hadto add to these, deeper shames still.

Schoolmasters ofGeniusAnd now, if I have reduced the ghosts of myschoolmasters to melancholy acquiescence inall this (which everybody who has been at anordinary school will recognize as true), I havestill to meet the much more sincere protestsof the handful of people who have a naturalgenius for “bringing up” children. I shall beasked with kindly scorn whether I have heardof Froebel and Pestalozzi, whether I knowthe work that is being done by Miss Masonand the Dottoressa Montessori or, best of allas I think, the Eurythmics School of JacquesDalcroze at Hellerau near Dresden. JacquesDalcroze, like Plato, believes in saturatinghis pupils with music. They walk to music,play to music, work to music, obey drillcommands that would bewilder a guardsmanto music, think to music, live to music, getso clearheaded about music that they canmove their several limbs each in a differentmetre until they become complicated living43

44 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenmagazines of cross rhythms, and, what ismore, make music for others to do all thesethings to. Stranger still, though JacquesDalcroze, like all these great teachers, is thecompletest of tyrants, knowing what is rightand that he must and will have the lessonjust so or else break his heart (not somebodyelse’s, observe), yet his school is so fascinatingthat every woman who sees it exclaims “Oh,why was I not taught like this!” and elderlygentlemen excitedly enrol themselves asstudents and distract classes of infants bytheir desperate endeavors to beat two in abar with one hand and three with the other,and start off on earnest walks round theroom, taking two steps backward wheneverMonsieur Daleroze calls out “Hop!” Oh yes: Iknow all about these wonderful schools thatyou cannot keep children or even adults outof, and these teachers whom their pupils notonly obey without coercion, but adore. And ifyou will tell me roughly how many Masonsand Montessoris and Dalcrozes you think youcan pick up in Europe for salaries of fromthirty shillings to five pounds a week, I willestimate your chances of converting yourmillions of little scholastic hells into littlescholastic heavens. If you are a distressedgentlewoman starting to make a living, youcan still open a little school; and you caneasily buy a secondhand brass plate inscribedPESTALOZZIAN INSTITUTE and nail it to

Schoolmasters of Genius 45your door, though you have no more idea ofwho Pestalozzi was and what he advocated orhow he did it than the manager of a hotelwhich began as a Hydropathic has of thewater cure. Or you can buy a cheaper plateinscribed KINDERGARTEN, and imagine,or leave others to imagine, that Froebel isthe governing genius of your little creche.No doubt the new brass plates are beinginscribed Montessori Institute, and will beused when the Dotteressa is no longer withus by all the Mrs Pipchins and Mrs Wilfersthroughout this unhappy land.I will go further, and admit that thebrass plates may not all be frauds. I willtell you that one of my friends was led togenuine love and considerable knowledge ofclassical literature by an Irish schoolmasterwhom you would call a hedge schoolmaster(he would not be allowed to teach anythingnow) and that it took four years of Harrowto obliterate that knowledge and changethe love into loathing. Another friend ofmine who keeps a school in the suburbs, andwho deeply deplores my “prejudice againstschoolmasters,” has offered to accept mychallenge to tell his pupils that they areas free to get up and go out of the schoolat any moment as their parents are to getup and go out of a theatre where my playsare being performed. Even among my ownschoolmasters I can recollect a few whose

46 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenclasses interested me, and whom I shouldcertainly have pestered for information andinstruction if I could have got into any decenthuman relationship with them, and if theyhad not been compelled by their positionto defend themselves as carefully againstsuch advances as against furtive attempts tohurt them accidentally in the football fieldor smash their hats with a clod from behinda wall. But these rare cases actually domore harm than good; for they encourage usto pretend that all schoolmasters are likethat. Of what use is it to us that there arealways somewhere two or three teachersof children whose specific genius for theiroccupation triumphs over our tyrannoussystem and even finds in it its opportunity?For that matter, it is possible, if difficult,to find a solicitor, or even a judge, who hassome notion of what law means, a doctorwith a glimmering of science, an officerwho understands duty and discipline, and aclergyman with an inkling of religion, thoughthere are nothing like enough of them to goround. But even the few who, like Ibsen’sMrs Solness, have “a genius for nursing thesouls of little children” are like angels forcedto work in prisons instead of in heaven; andeven at that they are mostly underpaid anddespised. That friend of mine who went fromthe hedge schoolmaster to Harrow once sawa schoolmaster rush from an elementary

Schoolmasters of Genius 47school in pursuit of a boy and strike him. Myfriend, not considering that the unfortunateman was probably goaded beyond endurance,smote the schoolmaster and blackened hiseye. The schoolmaster appealed to thelaw; and my friend found himself waitingnervously in the Hammersmith Police Courtto answer for his breach of the peace. In hisanxiety he asked a police officer what wouldhappen to him. “What did you do?” said theofficer. “I gave a man a black eye” said myfriend. “Six pounds if he was a gentleman:two pounds if he wasnt,” said the constable.“He was a schoolmaster” said my friend. “Twopounds” said the officer; and two pounds itwas. The blood money was paid cheerfully;and I have ever since advised elementaryschoolmasters to qualify themselves in theart of self-defence, as the British Constitutionexpresses our national estimate of them byallowing us to blacken three of their eyesfor the same price as one of an ordinaryprofessional man. How many Froebels andPestalozzis and Miss Masons and DoctoressMontessoris would you be likely to get onthese terms even if they occurred much morefrequently in nature than they actually do?No: I cannot be put off by the news thatour system would be perfect if it were workedby angels. I do not admit it even at that, justas I do not admit that if the sky fell we shouldall catch larks. But I do not propose to bother

48 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenabout a supply of specific genius which doesnot exist, and which, if it did exist, could operateonly by at once recognizing and establishingthe rights of children.

What We Do NotTeach, and WhyTo my mind, a glance at the subjects nowtaught in schools ought to convince anyreasonable person that the object of thelessons is to keep children out of mischief,and not to qualify them for their part in lifeas responsible citizens of a free State. Itis not possible to maintain freedom in anyState, no matter how perfect its originalconstitution, unless its publicly activecitizens know a good deal of constitutionalhistory, law, and political science, with itsbasis of economics. If as much pains hadbeen taken a century ago to make us allunderstand Ricardo’s law of rent as to learnour catechisms, the face of the world wouldhave been changed for the better. But for thatvery reason the greatest care is taken to keepsuch beneficially subversive knowledge fromus, with the result that in public life we areeither place-hunters, anarchists, or sheepshepherded by wolves.49

50 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and ChildrenBut it will be observed that theseare highly controversial subjects. Nowno controversial subject can be taughtdogmatically. He who knows only the officialside of a controversy knows less than nothingof its nature. The abler a schoolmaster is,the more dangerous he is to his pupils unlessthey have the fullest opportunity of hearinganother equally able person do his utmost toshake his authority and convict him of error.At present such teaching is very unpopular.It does not exist in schools; but everyadult who derives his knowledge of public affairsfrom the newspapers can take in, at thecost of an extra halfpenny, two papers of oppositepolitics. Yet the ordinary man so dislikeshaving his mind unsettled, as he calls it,that he angrily refuses to allow a paper whichdissents from his views to be brought into hishouse. Even at his club he resents seeing it,and excludes it if it happens to run counterto the opinions of all the members. The resultis that his opinions are not worth considering.A churchman who never reads TheFreethinker very soon has no more real religionthan the atheist who never reads TheChurch Times. The attitude is the same inboth cases: they want to hear nothing goodof their enemies; consequently they remainenemies and suffer from bad blood all theirlives; whereas men who know their opponentsand understand their case, quite commonly

What We Do Not Teach, and Why 51respect and like them, and always learn somethingfrom them.Here, again, as at so many points, we comeup against the abuse of schools to keep peoplein ignorance and error, so that they maybe incapable of successful revolt against theirindustrial slavery. The most important simplefundamental economic truth to impress ona child in complicated civilizations like ours isthe truth that whoever consumes goods or serviceswithout producing by personal effort theequivalent of what he or she consumes, inflictson the community precisely the same injurythat a thief produces, and would, in any honestState, be treated as a thief, however fullhis or her pockets might be of money made byother people. The nation that first teaches itschildren that truth, instead of flogging themif they discover it for themselves, may have tofight all the slaves of all the other nations tobegin with; but it will beat them as easily asan unburdened man with his hands free andwith all his energies in full play can beat aninvalid who has to carry another invalid onhis back.This, however, is not an evil produced bythe denial of children’s rights, nor is it inherentin the nature of schools. I mention it onlybecause it would be folly to call for a reformof our schools without taking account of thecorrupt resistance which awaits the reformer.A word must also be said about the oppo-

52 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrensition to reform of the vested interest of theclassical and coercive schoolmaster. He, poorwretch, has no other means of livelihood; andreform would leave him as a workman is nowleft when he is superseded by a machine. Hehad therefore better do what he can to getthe workman compensated, so as to make thepublic familiar with the idea of compensationbefore his own turn comes.

Taboo in SchoolsThe suppression of economic knowledge, disastrousas it is, is quite intelligible, its corruptmotive being as clear as the motive of a burglarfor concealing his jemmy from a policeman.But the other great suppression in ourschools, the suppression of the subject of sex,is a case of taboo. In mankind, the lower thetype, and the less cultivated the mind, the lesscourage there is to face important subjects objectively.The ablest and most highly cultivatedpeople continually discuss religion, politics,and sex: it is hardly an exaggeration tosay that they discuss nothing else with fullyawakenedinterest. Commoner and less cultivatedpeople, even when they form societiesfor discussion, make a rule that politics andreligion are not to be mentioned, and take itfor granted that no decent person would attemptto discuss sex. The three subjects arefeared because they rouse the crude passionswhich call for furious gratification in murderand rapine at worst, and, at best, lead to quarrelsand undesirable states of consciousness.53

54 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and ChildrenEven when this excuse of bad manners,ill temper, and brutishness (for that is whatit comes to) compels us to accept it fromthose adults among whom political andtheological discussion does as a matter of factlead to the drawing of knives and pistols,and sex discussion leads to obscenity, ithas no application to children except asan imperative reason for training themto respect other people’s opinions, and toinsist on respect for their own in these as inother important matters which are equallydangerous: for example, money. And in anycase there are decisive reasons; superior,like the reasons for suspending conventionalreticences between doctor and patient, to allconsiderations of mere decorum, for givingproper instruction in the facts of sex. Thosewho object to it (not counting coarse peoplewho thoughtlessly seize every opportunity ofaffecting and parading a fictitious delicacy)are, in effect, advocating ignorance as asafeguard against precocity. If ignorancewere practicable there would be something tobe said for it up to the age at which ignoranceis a danger instead of a safeguard. Even asit is, it seems undesirable that any specialemphasis should be given to the subject,whether by way of delicacy and poetry ortoo impressive warning. But the plain factis that in refusing to allow the child to betaught by qualified unrelated elders (the

Taboo in Schools 55parents shrink from the lesson, even whenthey are otherwise qualified, because theirown relation to the child makes the subjectimpossible between them) we are virtuallyarranging to have our children taught byother children in guilty secrets and uncleanjests. And that settles the question for allsensible people.The dogmatic objection, the sheer instinctivetaboo which rules the subject out altogetheras indecent, has no age limit. It meansthat at no matter what age a woman consentsto a proposal of marriage, she should do so inignorance of the relation she is undertaking.When this actually happens (and apparentlyit does happen oftener than would seem possible)a horrible fraud is being practiced onboth the man and the woman. He is led to believethat she knows what she is promising,and that he is in no danger of finding himselfbound to a woman to whom he is eugenicallyantipathetic. She contemplates nothingbut such affectionate relations as may existbetween her and her nearest kinsmen, andhas no knowledge of the condition which, ifnot foreseen, must come as an amazing revelationand a dangerous shock, ending possiblyin the discovery that the marriage has beenan irreparable mistake. Nothing can justifysuch a risk. There may be people incapableof understanding that the right to know allthere is to know about oneself is a natural hu-

56 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenman right that sweeps away all the pretencesof others to tamper with ones consciousnessin order to produce what they choose to considera good character. But they must herebow to the plain mischievousness of entrappingpeople into contracts on which the happinessof their whole lives depends without lettingthem know what they are undertaking.

Alleged Noveltiesin Modern SchoolsThere is just one more nuisance to bedisposed of before I come to the positive sideof my case. I mean the person who tells methat my schooldays belong to a bygone orderof educational ideas and institutions, andthat schools are not now a bit like my oldschool. I reply, with Sir Walter Raleigh, bycalling on my soul to give this statement thelie. Some years ago I lectured in Oxford onthe subject of Education. A friend to whomI mentioned my intention said, “You knownothing of modern education: schools are notnow what they were when you were a boy.”I immediately procured the time sheets ofhalf a dozen modern schools, and found, asI expected, that they might all have beenmy old school: there was no real difference.I may mention, too, that I have visitedmodern schools, and observed that there isa tendency to hang printed pictures in anuntidy and soulless manner on the walls, and57

58 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenoccasionally to display on the mantel-shelfa deplorable glass case containing certainobjects which might possibly, if placed inthe hands of the pupils, give them somepractical experience of the weight of a poundand the length of an inch. And sometimesa scoundrel who has rifled a bird’s nest orkilled a harmless snake encourages thechildren to go and do likewise by putting hisvictims into an imitation nest and bottle andexhibiting them as aids to “Nature study.” Asuggestion that Nature is worth study wouldcertainly have staggered my schoolmasters;so perhaps I may admit a gleam of progresshere. But as any child who attempted tohandle these dusty objects would probably becaned, I do not attach any importance to suchmodernities in school furniture. The schoolremains what it was in my boyhood, becauseits real object remains what it was. And thatobject, I repeat, is to keep the children out ofmischief: mischief meaning for the most partworrying the grown-ups.What is to be Done?The practical question, then, is what to dowith the children. Tolerate them at home wewill not. Let them run loose in the streets wedare not until our streets become safe placesfor children, which, to our utter shame, theyare not at present, though they can hardly beworse than some homes and some schools.The grotesque difficulty of making even

Alleged Novelties in Modern Schools 59a beginning was brought home to me in thelittle village in Hertfordshire where I writethese lines by the lady of the manor, whoasked me very properly what I was goingto do for the village school. I did not knowwhat to reply. As the school kept the childrenquiet during my working hours, I did not forthe sake of my own personal convenmencewant to blow it up with dynamite as Ishould like to blow up most schools. So Iasked for guidance. “You ought to give aprize,” said the lady. I asked if there wasa prize for good conduct. As I expected,there was: one for the best-behaved boyand another for the best-behaved girl. Onreflection I offered a handsome prize for theworst-behaved boy and girl on condition thata record should be kept of their subsequentcareers and compared with the records of thebest-behaved, in order to ascertain whetherthe school criterion of good conduct was validout of school. My offer was refused because itwould not have had the effect of encouragingthe children to give as little trouble aspossible, which is of course the real object ofall conduct prizes in schools.I must not pretend, then, that I havea system ready to replace all the othersystems. Obstructing the way of the properorganization of childhood, as of everythingelse, lies our ridiculous misdistribution ofthe national income, with its accompanying

60 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenclass distinctions and imposition of snobberyon children as a necessary part of theirsocial training. The result of our economicfolly is that we are a nation of undesirableacquaintances; and the first object of all ourinstitutions for children is segregation. If, forexample, our children were set free to roamand play about as they pleased, they wouldhave to be policed; and the first duty of thepolice in a State like ours would be to see thatevery child wore a badge indicating its classin society, and that every child seen speakingto another child with a lower-class badge, orany child wearing a higher badge than thatallotted to it by, say, the College of Heralds,should immediately be skinned alive with abirch rod. It might even be insisted that girlswith high-class badges should be attended byfootmen, grooms, or even military escorts. Inshort, there is hardly any limit to the follieswith which our Commercialism would infectany system that it would tolerate at all.But something like a change of heart is stillpossible; and since all the evils of snobberyand segregation are rampant in our schoolsat present we may as well make the best asthe worst of them.

Children’s Rightsand DutiesNow let us ask what are a child’s rights, andwhat are the rights of society over the child.Its rights, being clearly those of any otherhuman being, are summed up in the rightto live: that is, to have all the conclusivearguments that prove that it would be betterdead, that it is a child of wrath, that thepopulation is already excessive, that thepains of life are greater than its pleasures,that its sacrifice in a hospital or laboratoryexperiment might save millions of lives,etc. etc. etc., put out of the question, and itsexistence accepted as necessary and sacred,all theories to the contrary notwithstanding,whether by Calvin or Schopenhauer orPasteur or the nearest person with a taste forinfanticide. And this right to live includes,and in fact is, the right to be what the childlikes and can, to do what it likes and can, tomake what it likes and can, to think what itlikes and can, to smash what it dislikes and61

62 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrencan, and generally to behave in an altogetherunaccountable manner within the limitsimposed by the similar rights of its neighbors.And the rights of society over it clearly extendto requiring it to qualify itself to live insociety without wasting other peoples time:that is, it must know the rules of the road,be able to read placards and proclamations,fill voting papers, compose and send lettersand telegrams, purchase food and clothingand railway tickets for itself, count moneyand give and take change, and, generally,know how many beans made five. It mustknow some law, were it only a simple setof commandments, some political economy,agriculture enough to shut the gates of fieldswith cattle in them and not to trample ongrowing crops, sanitation enough not to defileits haunts, and religion enough to have someidea of why it is allowed its rights and whyit must respect the rights of others. And therest of its education must consist of anythingelse it can pick up; for beyond this societycannot go with any certainty, and indeed canonly go this far rather apologetically andprovisionally, as doing the best it can on veryuncertain ground.Should Children Earn their Living?Now comes the question how far childrenshould be asked to contribute to the supportof the community. In approaching it we mustput aside the considerations that now induce

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Children’sHappinessAlso it is important to put the happiness ofthe children rather carefully in its place,which is really not a front place. Theunsympathetic, selfish, hard people whoregard happiness as a very exceptionalindulgence to which children are by nomeans entitled, though they may be alloweda very little of it on their birthdays or atChristmas, are sometimes better parents ineffect than those who imagine that childrenare as capable of happiness as adults. Adultshabitually exaggerate their own capacity inthat direction grossly; yet most adults canstand an allowance of happiness that wouldbe quite thrown away on children. The secretof being miserable is to have leisure to botherabout whether you are happy or not. Thecure for it is occupation, because occupationmeans pre-occupation; and the pre-occupiedperson is neither happy nor unhappy, butsimply alive and active, which is pleasanter65

66 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenthan any happiness until you are tired ofit. That is why it is necessary to happinessthat one should be tired. Music after dinneris pleasant: music before breakfast is sounpleasant as to be clearly unnatural. Topeople who are not overworked holidays area nuisance. To people who are, and whocan afford them, they are a troublesomenecessity. A perpetual holiday is a goodworking definition of hell.

The Horror of thePerpetual HolidayIt will be said here that, on the contrary,heaven is always conceived as a perpetualholiday, and that whoever is not born to anindependent income is striving for one orlonging for one because it gives holidaysfor life. To which I reply, first, that heaven,as conventionally conceived, is a place soinane, so dull, so useless, so miserable, thatnobody has ever ventured to describe a wholeday in heaven, though plenty of people havedescribed a day at the seaside; and that thegenuine popular verdict on it is expressedin the proverb “Heaven for holiness andHell for company.” Second, I point out thatthe wretched people who have independentincomes and no useful occupation, do themost amazingly disagreeable and dangerousthings to make themselves tired and hungryin the evening. When they are not involvedin what they call sport, they are doingaimlessly what other people have to be paid67

68 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrento do: driving horses and motor cars; tryingon dresses and walking up and down toshew them off; and acting as footmen andhousemaids to royal personages. The sole andobvious cause of the notion that idleness isdelightful and that heaven is a place wherethere is nothing to be done, is our schoolsystem and our industrial system. The schoolis a prison in which work is a punishment anda curse. In avowed prisons, hard labor, theonly alleviation of a prisoner’s lot, is treatedas an aggravation of his punishment; andeverything possible is done to intensify theprisoner’s inculcated and unnatural notionthat work is an evil. In industry we areoverworked and underfed prisoners. Undersuch absurd circumstances our judgment ofthings becomes as perverted as our habits.If we were habitually underworked andoverfed, our notion of heaven would be aplace where everybody worked strenuouslyfor twenty-four hours a day and never gotanything to eat.Once realize that a perpetual holiday is beyondhuman endurance, and that “Satan findssome mischief still for idle hands to do” andit will be seen that we have no right to imposea perpetual holiday on children. If wedid, they would soon outdo the Labor Party intheir claim for a Right to Work Bill.In any case no child should be broughtup to suppose that its food and clothes

The Horror of the Perpetual Holiday 69come down from heaven or are miraculouslyconjured from empty space by papa.Loathsome as we have made the idea of duty(like the idea of work) we must habituatechildren to a sense of repayable obligation tothe community for what they consume andenjoy, and inculcate the repayment as a pointof honor. If we did that today—and nothingbut flat dishonesty prevents us from doingit—we should have no idle rich and indeedprobably no rich, since there is no distinctionin being rich if you have to pay scot andlot in personal effort like the working folk.Therefore, if for only half an hour a day, achild should do something serviceable to thecommunity.Productive work for children has the advantagethat its discipline is the discipline ofimpersonal necessity, not that of wanton personalcoercion. The eagerness of children inour industrial districts to escape from schoolto the factory is not caused by lighter tasksor shorter hours in the factory, nor altogetherby the temptation of wages, nor even by thedesire for novelty, but by the dignity of adultwork, the exchange of the factitious personaltyranny of the schoolmaster, from which thegrown-ups are free, for the stern but entirelydignified Laws of Life to which all flesh is subject.

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UniversitySchoolboyishnessOlder children might do a good deal beforebeginning their collegiate education. What isthe matter with our universities is that all thestudents are schoolboys, whereas it is of thevery essence of university education that theyshould be men. The function of a universityis not to teach things that can now be taughtas well or better by University Extensionlectures or by private tutors or moderncorrespondence classes with gramophones.We go to them to be socialized; to acquirethe hall mark of communal training; tobecome citizens of the world instead ofinmates of the enlarged rabbit hutches wecall homes; to learn manners and becomeunchallengeable ladies and gentlemen. Thesocial pressure which effects these changesshould be that of persons who have facedthe full responsibilities of adults as workingmembers of the general community, not thatof a barbarous rabble of half emancipated71

72 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenschoolboys and unemancipable pedants. Itis true that in a reasonable state of societythis outside experience would do for usvery completely what the university doesnow so corruptly that we tolerate its badmanners only because they are better thanno manners at all. But the university willalways exist in some form as a communityof persons desirous of pushing their cultureto the highest pitch they are capable of, notas solitary students reading in seclusion,but as members of a body of individuals allpursuing culture, talking culture, thinkingculture, above all, criticizing culture. If suchpersons are to read and talk and criticizeto any purpose, they must know the worldoutside the university at least as well as theshopkeeper in the High Street does. And thisis just what they do not know at present. Youmay say of them, paraphrasing Mr. Kipling,“What do they know of Plato that only Platoknow?” If our universities would excludeeverybody who had not earned a living by hisor her own exertions for at least a couple ofyears, their effect would be vastly improved.

The New LazinessThe child of the future, then, if there is to beany future but one of decay, will work moreor less for its living from an early age; andin doing so it will not shock anyone, providedthere be no longer any reason to associate theconception of children working for their livingwith infants toiling in a factory for tenhours a day or boys drudging from nine to sixunder gas lamps in underground city offices.Lads and lasses in their teens will probablybe able to produce as much as the most expensiveperson now costs in his own person (itis retinue that eats up the big income) withoutworking too hard or too long for quite asmuch happiness as they can enjoy. The questionto be balanced then will be, not how soonpeople should be put to work, but how soonthey should be released from any obligation ofthe kind. A life’s work is like a day’s work:it can begin early and leave off early or beginlate and leave off late, or, as with us, begintoo early and never leave off at all, obviouslythe worst of all possible plans. In any73

74 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenevent we must finally reckon work, not as thecurse our schools and prisons and capitalistprofit factories make it seem today, but as aprime necessity of a tolerable existence. Andif we cannot devise fresh wants as fast as wedevelop the means of supplying them, therewill come a scarcity of the needed, cut-anddried,appointed work that is always ready toeverybody’s hand. It may have to be sharedout among people all of whom want more ofit. And then a new sort of laziness will becomethe bugbear of society: the laziness thatrefuses to face the mental toil and adventureof making work by inventing new ideas or extendingthe domain of knowledge, and insistson a ready-made routine. It may come to forcingpeople to retire before they are willing tomake way for younger ones: that is, to drivingall persons of a certain age out of industry,leaving them to find something experimentalto occupy them on pain of perpetual holiday.Men will then try to spend twenty thousand ayear for the sake of having to earn it. Insteadof being what we are now, the cheapest andnastiest of the animals, we shall be the costliest,most fastidious, and best bred. In short,there is no end to the astonishing things thatmay happen when the curse of Adam becomesfirst a blessing and then an incurable habit.And in that day we must not grudge childrentheir share of it.

The Infinite SchoolTaskThe question of children’s work, however, isonly a question of what the child ought to dofor the community. How highly it should qualifyitself is another matter. But most of thedifficulty of inducing children to learn woulddisappear if our demands became not only definitebut finite. When learning is only an excusefor imprisonment, it is an instrument oftorture which becomes more painful the moreprogress is made. Thus when you have forceda child to learn the Church Catechism, a documentprofound beyond the comprehension ofmost adults, you are sometimes at a standstillfor something else to teach; and you thereforekeep the wretched child repeating its catechismagain and again until you hit on theplan of making it learn instalments of Bibleverses, preferably from the book of Numbers.But as it is less trouble to set a lesson that youknow yourself, there is a tendency to keep repeatingthe already learnt lesson rather than75

76 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenbreak new ground. At school I began with afairly complete knowledge of Latin grammarin the childish sense of being able to repeatall the paradigms; and I was kept at this, orrather kept in a class where the master neverasked me to do it because he knew I could,and therefore devoted himself to trapping theboys who could not, until I finally forgot mostof it. But when progress took place, what didit mean? First it meant Caesar, with the foreknowledgethat to master Caesar meant onlybeing set at Virgil, with the culminating horrorof Greek and Homer in reserve at the endof that. I preferred Caesar, because his statementthat Gaul is divided into three parts,though neither interesting nor true, was theonly Latin sentence I could translate at sight:therefore the longer we stuck at Caesar thebetter I was pleased. Just so do less classicallyeducated children see nothing in the masteryof addition but the beginning of subtraction,and so on through multiplication and divisionand fractions, with the black cloud of algebraon the horizon. And if a boy rushes through allthat, there is always the calculus to fall backon, unless indeed you insist on his learningmusic, and proceed to hit him if he cannot tellyou the year Beethoven was born.A child has a right to finality as regardsits compulsory lessons. Also as regardsphysical training. At present it is assumedthat the schoolmaster has a right to force

The Infinite School Task 77every child into an attempt to become Porsonand Bentley, Leibnitz and Newton, all rolledinto one. This is the tradition of the oldestgrammar schools. In our times an evenmore horrible and cynical claim has beenmade for the right to drive boys throughcompulsory games in the playing fields untilthey are too much exhausted physically todo anything but drop off to sleep. This issupposed to protect them from vice; but as italso protects them from poetry, literature,music, meditation and prayer, it may bedismissed with the obvious remark that ifboarding schools are places whose keepersare driven to such monstrous measures lestmore abominable things should happen, thenthe sooner boarding schools are violentlyabolished the better. It is true that societymay make physical claims on the child aswell as mental ones: the child must learnto walk, to use a knife and fork, to swim,to ride a bicycle, to acquire sufficient powerof self-defence to make an attack on it anarduous and uncertain enterprise, perhapsto fly. What as a matter of common-sense itclearly has not a right to do is to make thisan excuse for keeping the child slaving forten hours at physical exercises on the groundthat it is not yet as dexterous as Cinquevalliand as strong as Sandow.

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The Rewards andRisks of KnowledgeIn a word, we have no right to insist oneducating a child; for its education can endonly with its life and will not even thenbe complete. Compulsory completion ofeducation is the last folly of a rotten anddesperate civilization. It is the rattle in itsthroat before dissolution. All we can fairly dois to prescribe certain definite acquirementsand accomplishments as qualifications forcertain employments; and to secure them, notby the ridiculous method of inflicting injurieson the persons who have not yet masteredthem, but by attaching certain privileges (notpecuniary) to the employments.Most acquirements carry their ownprivileges with them. Thus a baby has tobe pretty closely guarded and imprisonedbecause it cannot take care of itself. It haseven to be carried about (the most completeconceivable infringement of its liberty) untilit can walk. But nobody goes on carrying79

80 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenchildren after they can walk lest they shouldwalk into mischief, though Arab boys maketheir sisters carry them, as our own spoiledchildren sometimes make their nurses, out ofmere laziness, because sisters in the East andnurses in the West are kept in servitude. Butin a society of equals (the only reasonable andpermanently possible sort of society) childrenare in much greater danger of acquiringbandy legs through being left to walk beforethey are strong enough than of being carriedwhen they are well able to walk. Anyhow,freedom of movement in a nursery is thereward of learning to walk; and in preciselythe same way freedom of movement in a cityis the reward of learning how to read publicnotices, and to count and use money. Theconsequences are of course much larger thanthe mere ability to read the name of a streetor the number of a railway platform and thedestination of a train. When you enable achild to read these, you also enable it to readthis preface, to the utter destruction, youmay quite possibly think, of its morals anddocility. You also expose it to the danger ofbeing run over by taxicabs and trains. Themoral and physical risks of education areenormous: every new power a child acquires,from speaking, walking, and co-ordinating itsvision, to conquering continents and foundingreligions, opens up immense new possibilitiesof mischief. Teach a child to write and you

The Rewards and Risks of Knowledge 81teach it how to forge: teach it to speak andyou teach it how to lie: teach it to walk andyou teach it how to kick its mother to death.The great problem of slavery for thosewhose aim is to maintain it is the problem ofreconciling the efficiency of the slave with thehelplessness that keeps him in servitude; andthis problem is fortunately not completelysoluble; for it is not in fact found possiblefor a duke to treat his solicitor or his doctoras he treats his laborers, though they areall equally his slaves: the laborer being infact less dependent on his favor than theprofessional man. Hence it is that men cometo resent, of all things, protection, because itso often means restriction of their liberty lestthey should make a bad use of it. If there aredangerous précipices about, it is much easierand cheaper to forbid people to walk near theedge than to put up an effective fence: thatis why both legislators and parents and thepaid deputies of parents are always inhibitingand prohibiting and punishing and scoldingand laming and cramping and delayingprogress and growth instead of making thedangerous places as safe as possible and thenboldly taking and allowing others to take theirreducible minimum of risk.

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English PhysicalHardihood andSpiritualCowardiceIt is easier to convert most people to the needfor allowing their children to run physicalrisks than moral ones. I can remember arelative of mine who, when I was a smallchild, unused to horses and very muchafraid of them, insisted on putting me ona rather rumbustious pony with little spurson my heels (knowing that in my agitation Iwould use them unconsciously), and beingenormously amused at my terrors. Yetwhen that same lady discovered that I hadfound a copy of The Arabian Nights and wasdevouring it with avidity, she was horrified,and hid it away from me lest it should breakmy soul as the pony might have broken myneck. This way of producing hardy bodies andtimid souls is so common in country houses83

84 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenthat you may spend hours in them listeningto stories of broken collar bones, brokenbacks, and broken necks without comingupon a single spiritual adventure or daringthought.But whether the risks to which liberty exposesus are moral or physical our right to libertyinvolves the right to run them. A manwho is not free to risk his neck as an aviatoror his soul as a heretic is not free at all; andthe right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21years but of 21 seconds.

The Risks ofIgnorance andWeaknessThe difficulty with children is that they needprotection from risks they are too young tounderstand, and attacks they can neitheravoid nor resist. You may on academicgrounds allow a child to snatch glowingcoals from the fire once. You will not doit twice. The risks of liberty we must leteveryone take; but the risks of ignoranceand self-helplessness are another matter.Not only children but adults need protectionfrom them. At present adults are oftenexposed to risks outside their knowledgeor beyond their comprehension or powersof resistance or foresight: for example, wehave to look on every day at marriages orfinancial speculations that may involve farworse consequences than burnt fingers. Andjust as it is part of the business of adultsto protect children, to feed them, clothe85

86 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenthem, shelter them, and shift for them in allsorts of ways until they are able to shift forthemselves, it is coming more and more to beseen that this is true not only of the relationbetween adults and children, but betweenadults and adults. We shall not always lookon indifferently at foolish marriages andfinancial speculations, nor allow dead mento control live communities by ridiculouswills and living heirs to squander and ruingreat estates, nor tolerate a hundred otherabsurd liberties that we allow today becausewe are too lazy to find out the proper wayto interfere. But the interference must beregulated by some theory of the individual’srights. Though the right to live is absolute, itis not unconditional. If a man is unbearablymischievous, he must be killed. This is amere matter of necessity, like the killing of aman-eating tiger in a nursery, a venomoussnake in the garden, or a fox in the poultryyard. No society could be constructed onthe assumption that such extermination is aviolation of the creature’s right to live, andtherefore must not be allowed. And then atonce arises the danger into which moralityhas led us: the danger of persecution.One Christian spreading his doctrinesmay seem more mischievous than a dozenthieves: throw him therefore to the lions.A lying or disobedient child may corrupt awhole generation and make human Society

The Risks of Ignorance and Weakness 87impossible: therefore thrash the vice out ofhim. And so on until our whole system ofabortion, intimidation, tyranny, cruelty andthe rest is in full swing again.

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The Common Senseof TolerationThe real safeguard against this is the dogmaof Toleration. I need not here repeat thecompact treatise on it which I prepared forthe Joint Committee on the Censorship ofStage Plays, and prefixed to The ShewingUp of Blanco Posnet. It must suffice now tosay that the present must not attempt toschoolmaster the future by pretending toknow good from evil in tendency, or protectcitizens against shocks to their opinions andconvictions, moral, political or religious: inother words it must not persecute doctrinesof any kind, or what is called bad taste, andmust insist on all persons facing such shocksas they face frosty weather or any of the otherdisagreeable, dangerous, or bracing incidentsof freedom. The expediency of Toleration hasbeen forced on us by the fact that progressiveenlightenment depends on a fair hearing fordoctrines which at first appear seditious,blasphemous, and immoral, and which deeply89

90 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenshock people who never think originally,thought being with them merely a habit andan echo. The deeper ground for Tolerationis the nature of creation, which, as we nowknow, proceeds by evolution. Evolution findsits way by experiment; and this finding ofthe way varies according to the stage ofdevelopment reached, from the blindestgroping along the line of least resistance tointellectual speculation, with its practicalsequel of hypothesis and experimentalverification; or to observation, induction,and deduction; or even into so rapid andintuitive an integration of all these processesin a single brain that we get the inspiredguess of the man of genius and the desperateresolution of the teacher of new truths whois first slain as a blasphemous apostate andthen worshipped as a prophet.Here the law for the child is the same asfor the adult. The high priest must not rendhis garments and cry “Crucify him” when heis shocked: the atheist must not clamor forthe suppression of Law’s Serious Call becauseit has for two centuries destroyed the naturalhappiness of innumerable unfortunatechildren by persuading their parents that itis their religious duty to be miserable. It, andthe Sermon on the Mount, and Machiavelli’sPrince, and La Rochefoucauld’s maxims,and Hymns Ancient and Modern, and DeGlanville’s apologue, and Dr. Watts’s rhymes,

The Common Sense of Toleration 91and Nietzsche’s Gay Science, and Ingersoll’sMistakes of Moses, and the speeches andpamphlets of the people who want us to makewar on Germany, and the Noodle’s Orationsand articles of our politicians and journalists,must all be tolerated not only because anyof them may for all we know be on the righttrack but because it is in the conflict ofopinion that we win knowledge and wisdom.However terrible the wounds suffered in thatconflict, they are better than the barren peaceof death that follows when all the combatantsare slaughtered or bound hand and foot.The difficulty at present is that thoughthis necessity for Toleration is a law ofpolitical science as well established as thelaw of gravitation, our rulers are nevertaught political science: on the contrary,they are taught in school that the mastertolerates nothing that is disagreeable tohim; that ruling is simply being master;and that the master’s method is the methodof violent punishment. And our citizens,all school taught, are walking in the samedarkness. As I write these lines the HomeSecretary is explaining that a man who hasbeen imprisoned for blasphemy must not bereleased because his remarks were painfulto the feelings of his pious fellow townsmen.Now it happens that this very HomeSecretary has driven many thousands of hisfellow citizens almost beside themselves by

92 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenthe crudity of his notions of government, andhis simple inability to understand why heshould not use and make laws to torment andsubdue people who do not happen to agreewith him. In a word, he is not a politician,but a grown-up schoolboy who has at lastgot a cane in his hand. And as all the restof us are in the same condition (except asto command of the cane) the only objectionmade to his proceedings takes the shape ofclamorous demands that he should be canedinstead of being allowed to cane other people.

The Sin ofAthanasiusIt seems hopeless. Anarchists are tempted topreach a violent and implacable resistance toall law as the only remedy; and the resultof that speedily is that people welcome anytyranny that will rescue them from chaos.But there is really no need to choose betweenanarchy and tyranny. A quite reasonablestate of things is practicable if we proceedon human assumptions and not on academicones. If adults will frankly give up theirclaim to know better than children what thepurposes of the Life Force are, and treatthe child as an experiment like themselves,and possibly a more successful one, and atthe same time relinquish their monstrousparental claims to personal private propertyin children, the rest must be left to commonsense. It is our attitude, our religion, that iswrong. A good beginning might be made byenacting that any person dictating a piece ofconduct to a child or to anyone else as the93

94 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenwill of God, or as absolutely right, should bedealt with as a blasphemer: as, indeed, guiltyof the unpardonable sin against the HolyGhost. If the penalty were death, it wouldrid us at once of that scourge of humanity,the amateur Pope. As an Irish Protestant, Iraise the cry of No Popery with hereditaryzest. We are overrun with Popes. Fromcurates and governesses, who may claim asort of professional standing, to parents anduncles and nurserymaids and school teachersand wiseacres generally, there are scores ofthousands of human insects groping throughour darkness by the feeble phosphorescenceof their own tails, yet ready at a moment’snotice to reveal the will of God on everypossible subject; to explain how and whythe universe was made (in my youth theyadded the exact date) and the circumstancesunder which it will cease to exist; to lay downprecise rules of right and wrong conduct;to discriminate infallibly between virtuousand vicious character; and all this with suchcertainty that they are prepared to visit allthe rigors of the law, and all the ruinouspenalties of social ostracism on people,however harmless their actions maybe whoventure to laugh at their monstrous conceitor to pay their assumptions the extravagantcompliment of criticizing them. As tochildren, who shall say what canings andbirchings and terrifyings and threats of hell

The Sin of Athanasius 95fire and impositions and humiliations andpetty imprisonings and sendings to bed andstanding in corners and the like they havesuffered because their parents and guardiansand teachers knew everything so much betterthan Socrates or Solon?It is this ignorant uppishness that doesthe mischief. A stranger on the planet mightexpect that its grotesque absurdity wouldprovoke enough ridicule to cure it; butunfortunately quite the contrary happens.Just as our ill health delivers us into thehands of medical quacks and creates apassionate demand for impudent pretencesthat doctors can cure the diseases theythemselves die of daily, so our ignorance andhelplessness set us clamoring for spiritualand moral quacks who pretend that they cansave our souls from their own damnation. Ifa doctor were to say to his patients, “I amfamiliar with your symptoms, because I haveseen other people in your condition; and Iwill bring the very little knowledge we haveto your treatment; but except in that veryshallow sense I dont know what is the matterwith you; and I cant undertake to cure you,”he would be a lost man professionally; and ifa clergyman, on being called on to award aprize for good conduct in the village school,were to say, “I am afraid I cannot say whois the best-behaved child, because I reallydo not know what good conduct is; but I

96 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenwill gladly take the teacher’s word as towhich child has caused least inconvenience,”he would probably be unfrocked, if notexcommunicated. And yet no honest andintellectually capable doctor or parson cansay more. Clearly it would not be wise ofthe doctor to say it, because optimistic lieshave such immense therapeutic value that adoctor who cannot tell them convincingly hasmistaken his profession. And a clergymanwho is not prepared to lay down the lawdogmatically will not be of much use in avillage school, though it behoves him all themore to be very careful what law he laysdown. But unless both the clergyman and thedoctor are in the attitude expressed by thesespeeches they are not fit for their work. Theman who believes that he has more than aprovisional hypothesis to go upon is a bornfool. He may have to act vigorously on it. Theworld has no use for the Agnostic who wontbelieve anything because anything mightbe false, and wont deny anything becauseanything might be true. But there is a widedifference between saying, “I believe this; andI am going to act on it,” or, “I dont believe it;and I wont act on it,” and saying, “It is true;and it is my duty and yours to act on it,” or,“It is false; and it is my duty and yours torefuse to act on it.” The difference is as greatas that between the Apostles’ Creed and theAthanasian Creed. When you repeat the

The Sin of Athanasius 97Apostles’ Creed you affirm that you believecertain things. There you are clearly withinyour rights. When you repeat the AthanasianCreed, you affirm that certain things are so,and that anybody who doubts that they are socannot be saved. And this is simply a piece ofimpudence on your part, as you know nothingabout it except that as good men as you havenever heard of your creed. The apostolicattitude is a desire to convert others to ourbeliefs for the sake of sympathy and light:the Athanasian attitude is a desire to murderpeople who dont agree with us. I am sufficientof an Athanasian to advocate a law for thespeedy execution of all Athanasians, becausethey violate the fundamental proposition ofmy creed, which is, I repeat, that all livingcreatures are experiments. The preciseformula for the Superman, ci-devant TheJust Man Made Perfect, has not yet beendiscovered. Until it is, every birth is anexperiment in the Great Research which isbeing conducted by the Life Force to discoverthat formula.

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The ExperimentExperimentingAnd now all the modern schoolmasterabortionists will rise up beaming, and say,“We quite agree. We regard every child inour school as a subject for experiment. Weare always experimenting with them. Wechallenge the experimental test for oursystem. We are continually guided by ourexperience in our great work of mouldingthe character of our future citizens, etc. etc.etc.” I am sorry to seem irreconcilable; butit is the Life Force that has to make theexperiment and not the schoolmaster; andthe Life Force for the child’s purpose is inthe child and not in the schoolmaster. Theschoolmaster is another experiment; anda laboratory in which all the experimentsbegan experimenting on one another wouldnot produce intelligible results. I admit,however, that if my schoolmasters hadtreated me as an experiment of the LifeForce: that is, if they had set me free to do99

100 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenas I liked subject only to my political rightsand theirs, they could not have watched theexperiment very long, because the first resultwould have been a rapid movement on mypart in the direction of the door, and mydisappearance there-through.It may be worth inquiring where I shouldhave gone to. I should say that practicallyevery time I should have gone to a much moreeducational place. I should have gone into thecountry, or into the sea, or into the NationalGallery, or to hear a band if there wasone, or to any library where there were noschoolbooks. I should have read very dry anddifficult books: for example, though nothingwould have induced me to read the budget ofstupid party lies that served as a text-bookof history in school, I remember readingRobertson’s Charles V. and his history ofScotland from end to end most laboriously.Once, stung by the airs of a schoolfellowwho alleged that he had read Locke On TheHuman Understanding, I attempted to readthe Bible straight through, and actuallygot to the Pauline Epistles before I brokedown in disgust at what seemed to me theirinveterate crookedness of mind. If there hadbeen a school where children were really free,I should have had to be driven out of it forthe sake of my health by the teachers; for thechildren to whom a literary education canbe of any use are insatiable: they will read

The Experiment Experimenting 101and study far more than is good for them.In fact the real difficulty is to prevent themfrom wasting their time by reading for thesake of reading and studying for the sake ofstudying, instead of taking some trouble tofind out what they really like and are capableof doing some good at. Some silly person willprobably interrupt me here with the remarkthat many children have no appetite for aliterary education at all, and would neveropen a book if they were not forced to. I haveknown many such persons who have beenforced to the point of obtaining Universitydegrees. And for all the effect their literaryexercises has left on them they might justas well have been put on the treadmill. Infact they are actually less literate than thetreadmill would have left them; for theymight by chance have picked up and dippedinto a volume of Shakespear or a translationof Homer if they had not been driven to loatheevery famous name in literature. I shouldprobably know as much Latin as French, ifLatin had not been made the excuse for myschool imprisonment and degradation.

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Why We LoatheLearning and LoveSportIf we are to discuss the importance of art,learning, and intellectual culture, the firstthing we have to recognize is that we havevery little of them at present; and that thislittle has not been produced by compulsoryeducation: nay, that the scarcity is unnaturaland has been produced by the violentexclusion of art and artists from schools. Onthe other hand we have quite a considerabledegree of bodily culture: indeed there isa continual outcry against the sacrifice ofmental accomplishments to athletics. Inother words a sacrifice of the professed objectof compulsory education to the real object ofvoluntary education. It is assumed that thismeans that people prefer bodily to mentalculture; but may it not mean that theyprefer liberty and satisfaction to coercion andprivation. Why is it that people who have103

104 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenbeen taught Shakespear as a school subjectloathe his plays and cannot by any means bepersuaded ever to open his works after theyescape from school, whereas there is still, 300years after his death, a wide and steady salefor his works to people who read his plays asplays, and not as task work? If Shakespear,or for that matter, Newton and Leibnitz, areallowed to find their readers and studentsthey will find them. If their works areannotated and paraphrased by dullards, andthe annotations and paraphrases forced on allyoung people by imprisonment and floggingand scolding, there will not be a single manof letters or higher mathematician the morein the country: on the contrary there will beless, as so many potential lovers of literatureand mathematics will have been incurablyprejudiced against them. Everyone who isconversant with the class in which childimprisonment and compulsory schoolingis carried out to the final extremity of theuniversity degree knows that its scholasticculture is a sham; that it knows littleabout literature or art and a great dealabout point-to-point races; and that thevillage cobbler, who has never read a pageof Plato, and is admittedly a dangerouslyignorant man politically, is nevertheless aSocrates compared to the classically educatedgentlemen who discuss politics in countryhouses at election time (and at no other time)

Why We Loathe Learning and Love Sport 105after their day’s earnest and skilful shooting.Think of the years and years of wearytorment the women of the piano-possessingclass have been forced to spend over thekeyboard, fingering scales. How many ofthem could be bribed to attend a pianoforterecital by a great player, though they willrise from sick beds rather than miss Ascot orGoodwood?Another familiar fact that teaches thesame lesson is that many women who havevoluntarily attained a high degree of culturecannot add up their own housekeepingbooks, though their education in simplearithmetic was compulsory, whereas theirhigher education has been wholly voluntary.Everywhere we find the same result. Theimprisonment, the beating, the taming andlaming, the breaking of young spirits, thearrest of development, the atrophy of allinhibitive power except the power of fear, arereal: the education is sham. Those who havebeen taught most know least.

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AntichristAmong the worst effects of the unnaturalsegregation of children in schools and theequally unnatural constant association ofthem with adults in the family is the utterdefeat of the vital element in Christianity.Christ stands in the world for that intuitionof the highest humanity that we, beingmembers one of another, must not complain,must not scold, must not strike, nor revilenor persecute nor revenge nor punish. Nowfamily life and school life are, as far as themoral training of children is concerned,nothing but the deliberate inculcation of aroutine of complaint, scolding, punishment,persecution, and revenge as the natural andonly possible way of dealing with evil orinconvenience. “Aint nobody to be whoppedfor this here?” exclaimed Sam Weller whenhe saw his employer’s name written up on astage coach, and conceived the phenomenonas an insult which reflected on himself. Thisexclamation of Sam Weller is at once thenegation of Christianity and the beginning107

108 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenand the end of current morality; and so itwill remain as long as the family and theschool persist as we know them: that is, aslong as the rights of children are so utterlydenied that nobody will even take the troubleto ascertain what they are, and coming ofage is like the turning of a convict into thestreet after twenty-one years penal servitude.Indeed it is worse; for the convict may havelearnt before his conviction how to live infreedom and may remember how to set aboutit, however lamed his powers of freedom mayhave become through disuse; but the childknows no other way of life but the slave’s way.Born free, as Rousseau says, he has beenlaid hands on by slaves from the moment ofhis birth and brought up as a slave. How ishe, when he is at last set free, to be anythingelse than the slave he actually is, clamoringfor war, for the lash, for police, prisons, andscaffolds in a wild panic of delusion thatwithout these things he is lost. The grown-upEnglishman is to the end of his days a badlybrought-up child, beyond belief quarrelsome,petulant, selfish, destructive, and cowardly:afraid that the Germans will come andenslave him; that the burglar will come androb him; that the bicycle or motor car will runover him; that the smallpox will attack him;and that the devil will run away with himand empty him out like a sack of coals on ablazing fire unless his nurse or his parents or

Antichrist 109his schoolmaster or his bishop or his judgeor his army or his navy will do somethingto frighten these bad things away. And thisEnglishman, without the moral courage of alouse, will risk his neck for fun fifty timesevery winter in the hunting field, and atBadajos sieges and the like will ram hishead into a hole bristling with sword bladesrather than be beaten in the one departmentin which he has been brought up to consulthis own honor. As a Sportsman (and waris fundamentally the sport of hunting andfighting the most dangerous of the beasts ofprey) he feels free. He will tell you himselfthat the true sportsman is never a snob, acoward, a duffer, a cheat, a thief, or a liar.Curious, is it not, that he has not the sameconfidence in other sorts of man?And even sport is losing its freedom. Sooneverybody will be schooled, mentally andphysically, from the cradle to the end of theterm of adult compulsory military service,and finally of compulsory civil service lastinguntil the age of superannuation. Alwaysmore schooling, more compulsion. We are tobe cured by an excess of the dose that haspoisoned us. Satan is to cast out Satan.

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Under the WhipClearly this will not do. We must reconcileeducation with liberty. We must find out somemeans of making men workers and, if needbe, warriors, without making them slaves.We must cultivate the noble virtues that havetheir root in pride. Now no schoolmasterwill teach these any more than a prisongovernor will teach his prisoners how tomutiny and escape. Self-preservation forceshim to break the spirit that revolts againsthim, and to inculcate submission, even toobscene assault, as a duty. A bishop once hadthe hardihood to say that he would rather seeEngland free than England sober. Nobodyhas yet dared to say that he would rather seean England of ignoramuses than an Englandof cowards and slaves. And if anyone did,it would be necessary to point out that theantithesis is not a practical one, as we havegot at present an England of ignoramuseswho are also cowards and slaves, andextremely proud of it at that, because inschool they are taught to submit, with what111

112 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenthey ridiculously call Oriental fatalism (asif any Oriental has ever submitted morehelplessly and sheepishly to robbery andoppression than we Occidentals do), to bedriven day after day into compounds and setto the tasks they loathe by the men they hateand fear, as if this were the inevitable destinyof mankind. And naturally, when they growup, they helplessly exchange the prison ofthe school for the prison of the mine or theworkshop or the office, and drudge alongstupidly and miserably, with just enoughgregarious instinct to turn furiously on anyintelligent person who proposes a change.It would be quite easy to make England aparadise, according to our present ideas, ina few years. There is no mystery about it:the way has been pointed out over and overagain. The difficulty is not the way but thewill. And we have no will because the firstthing done with us in childhood was to breakour will. Can anything be more disgustingthan the spectacle of a nation reading thebiography of Gladstone and gloating over theaccount of how he was flogged at Eton, twoof his schoolfellows being compelled to holdhim down whilst he was flogged. Not long agoa public body in England had to deal withthe case of a schoolmaster who, conceivinghimself insulted by the smoking of a cigaretagainst his orders by a pupil eighteenyears old, proposed to flog him publicly as

Under the Whip 113a satisfaction to what he called his honorand authority. I had intended to give theparticulars of this ease, but find the drudgeryof repeating such stuff too sickening, and theeffect unjust to a man who was doing onlywhat others all over the country were doingas part of the established routine of what iscalled education. The astounding part of itwas the manner in which the person to whomthis outrage on decency seemed quite properand natural claimed to be a functionary ofhigh character, and had his claim allowed. InJapan he would hardly have been allowed theprivilege of committing suicide. What is to besaid of a profession in which such obscenitiesare made points of honor, or of institutionsin which they are an accepted part of thedaily routine? Wholesome people would notargue about the taste of such nastinesses:they would spit them out; but we are taintedwith flagellomania from our childhood. Whenwill we realize that the fact that we canbecome accustomed to anything, howeverdisgusting at first, makes it necessary forus to examine carefully everything we havebecome accustomed to? Before motor carsbecame common, necessity had accustomedus to a foulness in our streets which wouldhave horrified us had the street been ourdrawing-room carpet. Before long we shallbe as particular about our streets as we noware about our carpets; and their condition

114 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenin the nineteenth century will become asforgotten and incredible as the condition ofthe corridors of palaces and the courts ofcastles was as late as the eighteenth century.This foulness, we can plead, was imposedon us as a necessity by the use of horsesand of huge retinues; but flogging has neverbeen so imposed: it has always been a vice,craved for on any pretext by those depravedby it. Boys were flogged when criminalswere hanged, to impress the awful warningon them. Boys were flogged at boundaries,to impress the boundaries on their memory.Other methods and other punishmentswere always available: the choice of thisone betrayed the sensual impulse whichmakes the practice an abomination. Butwhen its viciousness made it customary, itwas practised and tolerated on all handsby people who were innocent of anythingworse than stupidity, ill temper, and inabilityto discover other methods of maintainingorder than those they had always seenpractised and approved of. From children andanimals it extended to slaves and criminals.In the days of Moses it was limited to 39lashes. In the early nineteenth century ithad become an open madness: soldiers weresentenced to a thousand lashes for triflingoffences, with the result (among othersless mentionable) that the Iron Duke ofWellington complained that it was impossible

Under the Whip 115to get an order obeyed in the British armyexcept in two or three crack regiments. Suchfrantic excesses of this disgusting neurosisprovoked a reaction against it; but the clamorfor it by depraved persons never ceased,and was tolerated by a nation trained to itfrom childhood in the schools until last year(1913), when in what must be described asa paroxysm of sexual excitement provokedby the agitation concerning the White SlaveTraffic (the purely commercial nature ofwhich I was prevented from exposing onthe stage by the Censorship twenty yearsago) the Government yielded to an outcryfor flagellation led by the Archbishop ofCanterbury, and passed an Act under which ajudge can sentence a man to be flogged to theutmost extremity with any instrument usablefor such a purpose that he cares to prescribe.Such an Act is not a legislative phenomenonbut a psychopathic one. Its effect on theWhite Slave Traffic was, of course, to distractpublic attention from its real cause andfrom the people who really profit by it toimaginary “foreign scoundrels,” and to securea monopoly of its organization for women.And all this evil is made possible by theschoolmaster with his cane and birch, by theparents getting rid as best they can of the nuisanceof children making noise and mischiefin the house, and by the denial to children ofthe elementary rights of human beings.

116 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and ChildrenThe first man who enslaved and “broke in”an animal with a whip would have inventedthe explosion engine instead could he haveforeseen the curse he was laying on hisrace. For men and women learnt therebyto enslave and break in their children bythe same means. These children, grown up,knew no other methods of training. Finallythe evil that was done for gain by the greedywas refined on and done for pleasure by thelustful. Flogging has become a pleasurepurchasable in our streets, and inhibition agrown-up habit that children play at. “Goand see what baby is doing; and tell him hemustnt” is the last word of the nursery; andthe grimmest aspect of it is that it was firstformulated by a comic paper as a capital joke.

TechnicalInstructionTechnical instruction tempts to violence (asa short cut) more than liberal education.The sailor in Mr Rudyard Kipling’s CaptainsCourageous, teaching the boy the namesof the ship’s tackle with a rope’s end, doesnot disgust us as our schoolmasters do,especially as the boy was a spoiled boy. Butan unspoiled boy would not have needed thatdrastic medicine. Technical training may beas tedious as learning to skate or to playthe piano or violin; but it is the price onemust pay to achieve certain desirable resultsor necessary ends. It is a monstrous thingto force a child to learn Latin or Greek ormathematics on the ground that they arean indispensable gymnastic for the mentalpowers. It would be monstrous even if itwere true; for there is no labor that mightnot be imposed on a child or an adult on thesame pretext; but as a glance at the averageproducts of our public school and university117

118 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childreneducation shews that it is not true, it neednot trouble us. But it is a fact that ignoranceof Latin and Greek and mathematics closescertain careers to men (I do not meanartificial, unnecessary, noxious careers likethose of the commercial schoolmaster).Languages, even dead ones, have their uses;and, as it seems to many of us, mathematicshave their uses. They will always be learnedby people who want to learn them; and peoplewill always want to learn them as long asthey are of any importance in life: indeedthe want will survive their importance:superstition is nowhere stronger than in thefield of obsolete acquirements. And they willnever be learnt fruitfully by people who donot want to learn them either for their ownsake or for use in necessary work. There isno harder schoolmaster than experience; andyet experience fails to teach where there is nodesire to learn.Still, one must not begin to apply this generalizationtoo early. And this brings me toan important factor in the case: the factor ofevolution.

Docility andDependenceIf anyone, impressed by my view that therights of a child are precisely those of anadult, proceeds to treat a child as if it werean adult, he (or she) will find that though theplan will work much better at some pointsthan the usual plan, at others it will notwork at all; and this discovery may provokehim to turn back from the whole conceptionof children’s rights with a jest at the expenseof bachelors’ and old maids’ children. Indealing with children what is needed is notlogic but sense. There is no logical reasonwhy young persons should be allowed greatercontrol of their property the day after theyare twenty-one than the day before it. Thereis no logical reason why I, who strongly objectto an adult standing over a boy of ten with aLatin grammar, and saying, “you must learnthis, whether you want to or not,” shouldnevertheless be quite prepared to stand overa boy of five with the multiplication table119

120 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenor a copy book or a code of elementary goodmanners, and practice on his docility to makehim learn them. And there is no logicalreason why I should do for a child a greatmany little offices, some of them troublesomeand disagreeable, which I should not dofor a boy twice its age, or support a boy orgirl when I would unhesitatingly throw anadult on his own resources. But there arepractical reasons, and sensible reasons, andaffectionate reasons for all these illogicalities.Children do not want to be treated altogetheras adults: such treatment terrifies them andover-burdens them with responsibility. Intruth, very few adults care to be called onfor independence and originality: they alsoare bewildered and terrified in the absence ofprecedents and precepts and commandments;but modern Democracy allows them asanctioning and cancelling power if they arecapable of using it, which children are not.To treat a child wholly as an adult wouldbe to mock and destroy it. Infantile docilityand juvenile dependence are, like death, aproduct of Natural Selection; and thoughthere is no viler crime than to abuse them,yet there is no greater cruelty than to ignorethem. I have complained sufficiently of whatI suffered through the process of assault,imprisonment, and compulsory lessons thattaught me nothing, which are called myschooling. But I could say a good deal also

Docility and Dependence 121about the things I was not taught and shouldhave been taught, not to mention the thingsI was allowed to do which I should not havebeen allowed to do. I have no recollection ofbeing taught to read or write; so I presumeI was born with both faculties; but manypeople seem to have bitter recollections ofbeing forced reluctantly to acquire them. Andthough I have the uttermost contempt for ateacher so ill mannered and incompetent asto be unable to make a child learn to readand write without also making it cry, stillI am prepared to admit that I had ratherhave been compelled to learn to read andwrite with tears by an incompetent and illmannered person than left in ignorance.Reading, writing, and enough arithmetic touse money honestly and accurately, togetherwith the rudiments of law and order, becomenecessary conditions of a child’s liberty beforeit can appreciate the importance of its liberty,or foresee that these accomplishments areworth acquiring. Nature has provided for thisby evolving the instinct of docility. Childrenare very docile: they have a sound intuitionthat they must do what they are told orperish. And adults have an intuition, equallysound, that they must take advantage of thisdocility to teach children how to live properlyor the children will not survive. The difficultyis to know where to stop. To illustrate this,let us consider the main danger of childish

122 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrendocility and parental officiousness.

The Abuse ofDocilityDocility may survive as a lazy habit longafter it has ceased to be a beneficial instinct.If you catch a child when it is young enoughto be instinctively docile, and keep it in acondition of unremitted tutelage under thenurserymaid, the governess, the preparatoryschool, the secondary school, and theuniversity, until it is an adult, you willproduce, not a self-reliant, free, fully maturedhuman being, but a grown-up schoolboy orschoolgirl, capable of nothing in the wayof original or independent action exceptoutbursts of naughtiness in the womenand blackguardism in the men. That isexactly what we get at present in our richand consequently governing classes: theypass from juvenility to senility withoutever touching maturity except in body. Theclasses which cannot afford this sustainedtutelage are notably more self-reliant andgrown-up: an office boy of fifteen is often123

124 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenmore of a man than a university studentof twenty. Unfortunately this precocity isdisabled by poverty, ignorance, narrowness,and a hideous power of living without artor love or beauty and being rather proud ofit. The poor never escape from servitude:their docility is preserved by their slavery.And so all become the prey of the greedy, theselfish, the domineering, the unscrupulous,the predatory. If here and there an individualrefuses to be docile, ten docile persons willbeat him or lock him up or shoot him or hanghim at the bidding of his oppressors and theirown. The crux of the whole difficulty aboutparents, schoolmasters, priests, absolutemonarchs, and despots of every sort, is thetendency to abuse natural docility. A nationshould always be healthily rebellious; but theking or prime minister has yet to be foundwho will make trouble by cultivating thatside of the national spirit. A child shouldbegin to assert itself early, and shift for itselfmore and more not only in washing anddressing itself, but in opinions and conduct;yet as nothing is so exasperating and sounlovable as an uppish child, it is useless toexpect parents and schoolmasters to inculcatethis uppishness. Such unamiable preceptsas Always contradict an authoritativestatement, Always return a blow, Never lose achance of a good fight, When you are scoldedfor a mistake ask the person who scolds you

The Abuse of Docility 125whether he or she supposes you did it onpurpose, and follow the question with a blowor an insult or some other unmistakableexpression of resentment, Remember thatthe progress of the world depends on yourknowing better than your elders, are justas important as those of The Sermon onthe Mount; but no one has yet seen themwritten up in letters of gold in a schoolroomor nursery. The child is taught to be kind, tobe respectful, to be quiet, not to answer back,to be truthful when its elders want to findout anything from it, to lie when the truthwould shock or hurt its elders, to be aboveall things obedient, and to be seen and notheard. Here we have two sets of precepts,each warranted to spoil a child hopelesslyif the other be omitted. Unfortunately wedo not allow fair play between them. Therebellious, intractable, aggressive, selfish setprovoke a corrective resistance, and do notpretend to high moral or religious sanctions;and they are never urged by grown-up peopleon young people. They are therefore morein danger of neglect or suppression than theother set, which have all the adults, all thelaws, all the religions on their side. How isthe child to be secured its due share of bothbodies of doctrine?

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The Schoolboy andthe HomeboyIn practice what happens is that parentsnotice that boys brought up at home becomemollycoddles, or prigs, or duffers, unableto take care of themselves. They see thatboys should learn to rough it a little and tomix with children of their own age. This isnatural enough. When you have preachedat and punished a boy until he is a moralcripple, you are as much hampered by himas by a physical cripple; and as you do notintend to have him on your hands all yourlife, and are generally rather impatient forthe day when he will earn his own living andleave you to attend to yourself, you sooner orlater begin to talk to him about the need forself-reliance, learning to think, and so forth,with the result that your victim, bewilderedby your inconsistency, concludes that thereis no use trying to please you, and falls intoan attitude of sulky resentment. Which isan additional inducement to pack him off to127

128 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenschool.In school, he finds himself in a dualworld, under two dispensations. There isthe world of the boys, where the point ofhonor is to be untameable, always ready tofight, ruthless in taking the conceit out ofanyone who ventures to give himself airs ofsuperior knowledge or taste, and generallyto take Lucifer for one’s model. And thereis the world of the masters, the world ofdiscipline, submission, diligence, obedience,and continual and shameless assumptionof moral and intellectual authority. Thusthe schoolboy hears both sides, and is sofar better off than the homebred boy whohears only one. But the two sides are notfairly presented. They are presented as goodand evil, as vice and virtue, as villainy andheroism. The boy feels mean and cowardlywhen he obeys, and selfish and rascally whenhe disobeys. He looses his moral courage justas he comes to hate books and languages.In the end, John Ruskin, tied so close tohis mother’s apron-string that he did notescape even when he went to Oxford, andJohn Stuart Mill, whose father ought to havebeen prosecuted for laying his son’s childhoodwaste with lessons, were superior, as productsof training, to our schoolboys. They were veryconspicuously superior in moral courage; andthough they did not distinguish themselvesat cricket and football, they had quite as

The Schoolboy and the Homeboy 129much physical hardihood as any civilizedman needs. But it is to be observed thatRuskin’s parents were wise people who gaveJohn a full share in their own life, and put upwith his presence both at home and abroadwhen they must sometimes have been veryweary of him; and Mill, as it happens, wasdeliberately educated to challenge all themost sacred institutions of his country. Thehouseholds they were brought up in were nomore average households than a Montessorischool is an average school.

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The Comings ofAge of ChildrenAll this inculcated adult docility, whichwrecks every civilization as it is wreckingours, is inhuman and unnatural. We mustreconsider our institution of the Coming ofAge, which is too late for some purposes, andtoo early for others. There should be a seriesof Coming of Ages for every individual. Themammals have their first coming of age whenthey are weaned; and it is noteworthy thatthis rather cruel and selfish operation onthe part of the parent has to be performedresolutely, with claws and teeth; for yourlittle mammal does not want to be weaned,and yields only to a pretty rough assertion ofthe right of the parent to be relieved of thechild as soon as the child is old enough tobear the separation. The same thing occurswith children: they hang on to the mother’sapron-string and the father’s coat tails aslong as they can, often baffling those sensitiveparents who know that children should think131

132 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenfor themselves and fend for themselves, butare too kind to throw them on their ownresources with the ferocity of the domesticcat. The child should have its first comingof age when it is weaned, another when itcan talk, another when it can walk, anotherwhen it can dress itself without assistance;and when it can read, write, count money,and pass an examination in going a simpleerrand involving a purchase and a journeyby rail or other public method of locomotion,it should have quite a majority. At presentthe children of laborers are soon mobile andable to shift for themselves, whereas it ispossible to find grown-up women in the richclasses who are actually afraid to take a walkin the streets unattended and unprotected. Itis true that this is a superstition from thetime when a retinue was part of the stateof persons of quality, and the unattendedperson was supposed to be a common personof no quality, earning a living; but this hasnow become so absurd that children andyoung women are no longer told why theyare forbidden to go about alone, and have tobe persuaded that the streets are dangerousplaces, which of course they are; but peoplewho are not educated to live dangerouslyhave only half a life, and are more likely todie miserably after all than those who havetaken all the common risks of freedom fromtheir childhood onward as matters of course.

The Conflict ofWillsThe world wags in spite of its schools and itsfamilies because both schools and familiesare mostly very largely anarchic: parentsand schoolmasters are good-natured orweak or lazy; and children are docile andaffectionate and very shortwinded in theirfits of naughtiness; and so most familiesslummock along and muddle through untilthe children cease to be children. In thefew cases when the parties are energeticand determined, the child is crushed or theparent is reduced to a cipher, as the case maybe. When the opposed forces are neither ofthem strong enough to annihilate the other,there is serious trouble: that is how we getthose feuds between parent and child whichrecur to our memory so ironically when wehear people sentimentalizing about naturalaffection. We even get tragedies; for thereis nothing so tragic to contemplate or sodevastating to suffer as the oppression of will133

134 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenwithout conscience; and the whole tendencyof our family and school system is to setthe will of the parent and the school despotabove conscience as something that must bedeferred to abjectly and absolutely for its ownsake.The strongest, fiercest force in nature ishuman will. It is the highest organizationwe know of the will that has created thewhole universe. Now all honest civilization,religion, law, and convention is an attemptto keep this force within beneficent bounds.What corrupts civilization, religion, law,and convention (and they are at presentpretty nearly as corrupt as they dare) isthe constant attempts made by the wills ofindividuals and classes to thwart the willsand enslave the powers of other individualsand classes. The powers of the parentand the schoolmaster, and of their publicanalogues the lawgiver and the judge, becomeinstruments of tyranny in the hands of thosewho are too narrow-minded to understandlaw and exercise judgment; and in theirhands (with us they mostly fall into suchhands) law becomes tyranny. And what isa tyrant? Quite simply a person who saysto another person, young or old, “You shalldo as I tell you; you shall make what Iwant; you shall profess my creed; you shallhave no will of your own; and your powersshall be at the disposal of my will.” It has

The Conflict of Wills 135come to this at last: that the phrase “shehas a will of her own,” or “he has a will ofhis own” has come to denote a person ofexceptional obstinacy and self-assertion. Andeven persons of good natural disposition,if brought up to expect such deference, areroused to unreasoning fury, and sometimesto the commission of atrocious crimes, bythe slightest challenge to their authority.Thus a laborer may be dirty, drunken,untruthful, slothful, untrustworthy in everyway without exhausting the indulgence ofthe country house. But let him dare to be“disrespectful” and he is a lost man, thoughhe be the cleanest, soberest, most diligent,most veracious, most trustworthy man in thecounty. Dickens’s instinct for detecting socialcankers never served him better than whenhe shewed us Mrs Heep teaching her son to“be umble,” knowing that if he carried outthat precept he might be pretty well anythingelse he liked. The maintenance of deferenceto our wills becomes a mania which will carrythe best of us to any extremity. We will allowa village of Egyptian fellaheen or Indiantribesmen to live the lowest life they pleaseamong themselves without molestation; butlet one of them slay an Englishman or evenstrike him on the strongest provocation, andstraightway we go stark mad, burning anddestroying, shooting and shelling, floggingand hanging, if only such survivors as we may

136 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenleave are thoroughly cowed in the presenceof a man with a white face. In the committeeroom of a local council or city corporation,the humblest employees of the committeefind defenders if they complain of harshtreatment. Gratuities are voted, indulgencesand holidays are pleaded for, delinquenciesare excused in the most sentimental mannerprovided only the employee, however patenta hypocrite or incorrigible a slacker, is hatin hand. But let the most obvious measureof justice be demanded by the secretaryof a Trade Union in terms which omit allexpressions of subservience, and it is withthe greatest difficulty that the cooler-headedcan defeat angry motions that the letter bethrown into the waste paper basket and thecommittee proceed to the next business.

The Demagogue’sOpportunityAnd the employee has in him the same fierceimpulse to impose his will without respect forthe will of others. Democracy is in practicenothing but a device for cajoling from himthe vote he refuses to arbitrary authority.He will not vote for Coriolanus; but whenan experienced demagogue comes along andsays, “Sir: you are the dictator: the voice ofthe people is the voice of God; and I am onlyyour very humble servant,” he says at once,“All right: tell me what to dictate,” and ispresently enslaved more effectually with hisown silly consent than Coriolanus wouldever have enslaved him without asking hisleave. And the trick by which the demagoguedefeats Coriolanus is played on him in histurn by his inferiors. Everywhere we see thecunning succeeding in the world by seekinga rich or powerful master and practisingon his lust for subservience. The politicaladventurer who gets into parliament by137

138 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenoffering himself to the poor voter, not as hisrepresentative but as his will-less soulless“delegate,” is himself the dupe of a clever wifewho repudiates Votes for Women, knowingwell that whilst the man is master, the man’smistress will rule. Uriah Heep may be acrawling creature; but his crawling takes himupstairs.Thus does the selfishness of the will turnon itself, and obtain by flattery what it cannotseize by open force. Democracy becomesthe latest trick of tyranny: “womanliness” becomesthe latest wile of prostitution.Between parent and child the sameconflict wages and the same destruction ofcharacter ensues. Parents set themselvesto bend the will of their children to theirown—to break their stubborn spirit, asthey call it—with the ruthlessness ofGrand Inquisitors. Cunning, unscrupulouschildren learn all the arts of the sneak incircumventing tyranny: children of bettercharacter are cruelly distressed and more orless lamed for life by it.

OurQuarrelsomenessAs between adults, we find a generalquarrelsomeness which makes politicalreform as impossible to most Englishmenas to hogs. Certain sections of the nationget cured of this disability. University men,sailors, and politicians are comparativelyfree from it, because the communal life ofthe University, the fact that in a ship a manmust either learn to consider others or elsego overboard or into irons, and the habit ofworking on committees and ceasing to expectmore of one’s own way than is included in thegreatest common measure of the committee,educate the will socially. But no one who hasever had to guide a committee of ordinaryprivate Englishmen through their firstattempts at collective action, in committee orotherwise, can retain any illusions as to theappalling effects on our national mannersand character of the organization of thehome and the school as petty tyrannies, and139

140 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenthe absence of all teaching of self-respectand training in self-assertion. Bullied andordered about, the Englishman obeys likea sheep, evades like a knave, or tries tomurder his oppressor. Merely criticizedor opposed in committee, or invited toconsider anybody’s views but his own, hefeels personally insulted and wants to resignor leave the room unless he is apologized to.And his panic and bewilderment when hesees that the older hands at the work haveno patience with him and do not intend totreat him as infallible, are pitiable as far asthey are anything but ludicrous. That is whatcomes of not being taught to consider otherpeople’s wills, and left to submit to them orto over-ride them as if they were the windsand the weather. Such a state of mind isincompatible not only with the democraticintroduction of high civilization, but withthe comprehension and maintenance of suchcivilized institutions as have been introducedby benevolent and intelligent despots andaristocrats.

We Must ReformSociety before wecan ReformOurselvesWhen we come to the positive problem ofwhat to do with children if we are to give upthe established plan, we find the difficultiesso great that we begin to understand why somany people who detest the system and lookback with loathing on their own schooldays,must helplessly send their children to thevery schools they themselves were sentto, because there is no alternative exceptabandoning the children to undisciplinedvagabondism. Man in society must do aseverybody else does in his class: only foolsand romantic novices imagine that freedomis a mere matter of the readiness of theindividual to snap his fingers at convention.It is true that most of us live in a conditionof quite unnecessary inhibition, wearing ugly141

142 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenand uncomfortable clothes, making ourselvesand other people miserable by the heathenhorrors of mourning, staying away from thetheatre because we cannot afford the stallsand are ashamed to go to the pit, and indozens of other ways enslaving ourselveswhen there are comfortable alternativesopen to us without any real drawbacks. Thecontemplation of these petty slaveries, andof the triumphant ease with which sensiblepeople throw them off, creates an impressionthat if we only take Johnson’s advice tofree our minds from cant, we can achievefreedom. But if we all freed our minds fromcant we should find that for the most partwe should have to go on doing the necessarywork of the world exactly as we did it beforeuntil we organized new and free methods ofdoing it. Many people believed in secondaryco-education (boys and girls taught together)before schools like Bedales were founded:indeed the practice was common enough inelementary schools and in Scotland; but theirbelief did not help them until Bedales and StGeorge’s were organized; and there are stillnot nearly enough co-educational schools inexistence to accommodate all the children ofthe parents who believe in co-education upto university age, even if they could alwaysafford the fees of these exceptional schools. Itmay be edifying to tell a duke that our publicschools are all wrong in their constitution

We Must Reform Society 143and methods, or a costermonger that childrenshould be treated as in Goethe’s WilhelmMeister instead of as they are treated at theelementary school at the corner of his street;but what are the duke and the coster to do?Neither of them has any effective choice inthe matter: their children must either go tothe schools that are, or to no school at all.And as the duke thinks with reason that hisson will be a lout or a milksop or a prig if hedoes not go to school, and the coster knowsthat his son will become an illiterate hooliganif he is left to the streets, there is no realalternative for either of them. Child life mustbe socially organized: no parent, rich or poor,can choose institutions that do not exist; andthe private enterprise of individual schoolmasters appealing to a group of well-to-doparents, though it may shew what can bedone by enthusiasts with new methods,cannot touch the mass of our children. Forthe average parent or child nothing is reallyavailable except the established practice;and this is what makes it so important thatthe established practice should be a soundone, and so useless for clever individualsto disparage it unless they can organize analternative practice and make it, too, general.

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The Pursuit ofMannersIf you cross-examine the duke and the coster,you will find that they are not concerned forthe scholastic attainments of their children.Ask the duke whether he could pass thestandard examination of twelve-year-oldchildren in elementary schools, and he willadmit, with an entirely placid smile, thathe would almost certainly be ignominiouslyplucked. And he is so little ashamed of ordisadvantaged by his condition that he is notprepared to spend an hour in remedying it.The coster may resent the inquiry insteadof being amused by it; but his answer, iftrue, will be the same. What they both wantfor their children is the communal training,the apprenticeship to society, the lessons inholding one’s own among people of all sortswith whom one is not, as in the home, onprivileged terms. These can be acquiredonly by “mixing with the world,” no matterhow wicked the world is. No parent cares145

146 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrentwopence whether his children can writeLatin hexameters or repeat the dates ofthe accession of all the English monarchssince the Conqueror; but all parents areearnestly anxious about the manners of theirchildren. Better Claude Duval than KasparHauser. Laborers who are contemptuouslyanti-clerical in their opinions will send theirdaughters to the convent school because thenuns teach them some sort of gentleness ofspeech and behavior. And peers who tell youthat our public schools are rotten throughand through, and that our Universities oughtto be razed to the foundations, send their sonsto Eton and Oxford, Harrow and Cambridge,not only because there is nothing else to bedone, but because these places, though theyturn out blackguards and ignoramuses andboobies galore, turn them out with the habitsand manners of the society they belong to.Bad as those manners are in many respects,they are better than no manners at all. Andno individual or family can possibly teachthem. They can be acquired only by living inan organized community in which they aretraditional.Thus we see that there are reasons forthe segregation of children even in familieswhere the great reason: namely, that childrenare nuisances to adults, does not press veryhardly, as, for instance, in the houses of thevery poor, who can send their children to

The Pursuit of Manners 147play in the streets, or the houses of the veryrich, which are so large that the children’squarters can be kept out of the parents’ waylike the servants’ quarters.

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Not too much Windon the Heath,BrotherWhat, then, is to be done? For the present,unfortunately, little except propagating theconception of Children’s Rights. Only theachievement of economic equality throughSocialism can make it possible to dealthoroughly with the question from the pointof view of the total interest of the community,which must always consist of grown-upchildren. Yet economic equality, like allsimple and obvious arrangements, seemsimpossible to people brought up as childrenare now. Still, something can be done evenwithin class limits. Large communities ofchildren of the same class are possible today;and voluntary organization of outdoor life forchildren has already begun in Boy Scoutingand excursions of one kind or another.The discovery that anything, even schoollife, is better for the child than home life,149

150 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenwill become an over-ridden hobby; and weshall presently be told by our faddists thatanything, even camp life, is better than schoollife. Some blundering beginnings of this arealready perceptible. There is a movement formaking our British children into priggishlittle barefooted vagabonds, all talking likethat born fool George Borrow, and supposedto be splendidly healthy because they woulddie if they slept in rooms with the windowsshut, or perhaps even with a roof over theirheads. Still, this is a fairly healthy folly; andit may do something to establish Mr HaroldCox’s claim of a Right to Roam as the basisof a much needed law compelling proprietorsof land to provide plenty of gates in theirfences, and to leave them unlocked whenthere are no growing crops to be damagednor bulls to be encountered, instead of, asat present, imprisoning the human race industy or muddy thoroughfares between wallsof barbed wire.The reaction against vagabondage willcome from the children themselves. Forthem freedom will not mean the expensivekind of savagery now called “the simple life.”Their natural disgust with the visions ofcockney book fanciers blowing themselvesout with “the wind on the heath, brother,”and of anarchists who are either too weakto understand that men are strong and freein proportion to the social pressure they can

Not too much Wind on the Heath, Brother151stand and the complexity of the obligationsthey are prepared to undertake, or too strongto realize that what is freedom to them maybe terror and bewilderment to others, willdrive them back to the home and the schoolif these have meanwhile learned the lessonthat children are independent human beingsand have rights.

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Wanted: a Child’sMagna ChartaWhether we shall presently be discussinga Juvenile Magna Charta or Declarationof Rights by way of including children inthe Constitution is a question on which Ileave others to speculate. But if it couldonce be established that a child has anadult’s Right of Egress from uncomfortableplaces and unpleasant company, and therewere children’s lawyers to sue pedagoguesand others for assault and imprisonment,there would be an amazing change in thebehavior of schoolmasters, the quality ofschool books, and the amenities of school life.That Consciousness of Consent which, evenin its present delusive form, has enabledDemocracy to oust tyrannical systems inspite of all its vulgarities and stupiditiesand rancors and ineptitudes and ignorances,would operate as powerfully among childrenas it does now among grown-ups. Nodoubt the pedagogue would promptly turn153

154 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrendemagogue, and woo his scholars by all thearts of demagogy; but none of these arts caneasily be so dishonorable or mischievous asthe art of caning. And, after all, if largerliberties are attached to the acquisition ofknowledge, and the child finds that it can nomore go to the seaside without a knowledgeof the multiplication and pence tables than itcan be an astronomer without mathematics,it will learn the multiplication table, which ismore than it always does at present, in spiteof all the canings and keepings in.

The Pursuit ofLearningWhen the Pursuit of Learning comes to meanthe pursuit of learning by the child instead ofthe pursuit of the child by Learning, cane inhand, the danger will be precocity of the intellect,which is just as undesirable as precocityof the emotions. We still have a silly habitof talking and thinking as if intellect were amechanical process and not a passion; and inspite of the German tutors who confess openlythat three out of every five of the young menthey coach for examinations are lamed for lifethereby; in spite of Dickens and his picture oflittle Paul Dombey dying of lessons, we persistin heaping on growing children and adolescentyouths and maidens tasks Pythagoraswould have declined out of common regard forhis own health and common modesty as to hisown capacity. And this overwork is not all theeffect of compulsion; for the average schoolmasterdoes not compel his scholars to learn:he only scolds and punishes them if they do155

156 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrennot, which is quite a different thing, the neteffect being that the school prisoners need notlearn unless they like. Nay, it is sometimes remarkedthat the school dunce—meaning theone who does not like—often turns out wellafterwards, as if idleness were a sign of abilityand character. A much more sensible explanationis that the so-called dunces are notexhausted before they begin the serious businessof life. It is said that boys will be boys;and one can only add one wishes they would.Boys really want to be manly, and are unfortunatelyencouraged thoughtlessly in this verydangerous and overstraining aspiration. Allthe people who have really worked (HerbertSpencer for instance) warn us against workas earnestly as some people warn us againstdrink. When learning is placed on the voluntaryfooting of sport, the teacher will findhimself saying every day “Run away and play:you have worked as much as is good for you.”Trying to make children leave school will belike trying to make them go to bed; and it willbe necessary to surprise them with the ideathat teaching is work, and that the teacher istired and must go play or rest or eat: possibilitiesalways concealed by that infamous humbugthe current schoolmaster, who achieves aspurious divinity and a witch doctor’s authorityby persuading children that he is not human,just as ladies persuade them that theyhave no legs.

Children andGame: a ProposalOf the many wild absurdities of our existingsocial order perhaps the most grotesque isthe costly and strictly enforced reservation oflarge tracts of country as deer forests andbreeding grounds for pheasants whilst thereis so little provision of the kind made forchildren. I have more than once thought oftrying to introduce the shooting of childrenas a sport, as the children would then bepreserved very carefully for ten months inthe year, thereby reducing their death ratefar more than the fusillades of the sportsmenduring the other two would raise it. Atpresent the killing of a fox except by a pack offoxhounds is regarded with horror; but youmay and do kill children in a hundred andfifty ways provided you do not shoot themor set a pack of dogs on them. It must beadmitted that the foxes have the best of it;and indeed a glance at our pheasants, ourdeer, and our children will convince the most157

158 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrensceptical that the children have decidedly theworst of it.This much hope, however, can beextracted from the present state of things.It is so fantastic, so mad, so apparentlyimpossible, that no scheme of reform needever henceforth be discredited on the groundthat it is fantastic or mad or apparentlyimpossible. It is the sensible schemes,unfortunately, that are hopeless in England.Therefore I have great hopes that my ownviews, though fundamentally sensible, can bemade to appear fantastic enough to have achance.First, then, I lay it down as a primecondition of sane society, obvious as suchto anyone but an idiot, that in any decentcommunity, children should find in every partof their native country, food, clothing, lodging,instruction, and parental kindness for theasking. For the matter of that, so shouldadults; but the two cases differ in that asthese commodities do not grow on the bushes,the adults cannot have them unless theythemselves organize and provide the supply,whereas the children must have them as if bymagic, with nothing to do but rub the lamp,like Aladdin, and have their needs satisfied.

The Parents’Intolerable BurdenThere is nothing new in this: it is howchildren have always had and must alwayshave their needs satisfied. The parent has toplay the part of Aladdin’s djinn; and many aparent has sunk beneath the burden of thisservice. All the novelty we need is to organizeit so that instead of the individual childfastening like a parasite on its own particularparents, the whole body of children shouldbe thrown not only upon the whole body ofparents, but upon the celibates and childlessas well, whose present exemption from afull share in the social burden of children isobviously unjust and unwholesome. Today itis easy to find a widow who has at great costto herself in pain, danger, and disablement,borne six or eight children. In the sametown you will find rich bachelors and oldmaids, and married couples with no childrenor with families voluntarily limited to twoor three. The eight children do not belong159

160 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrento the woman in any real or legal sense.When she has reared them they pass awayfrom her into the community as independentpersons, marrying strangers, working forstrangers, spending on the community thelife that has been built up at her expense. Nomore monstrous injustice could be imaginedthan that the burden of rearing the childrenshould fall on her alone and not on thecelibates and the selfish as well.This is so far recognized that alreadythe child finds, wherever it goes, a schoolfor it, and somebody to force it into theschool; and more and more these schoolsare being driven by the mere logic of factsto provide the children with meals, withboots, with spectacles, with dentists anddoctors. In fact, when the child’s parentsare destitute or not to be found, bread,lodging, and clothing are provided. It is truethat they are provided grudgingly and onconditions infamous enough to draw downabundant fire from Heaven upon us everyday in the shape of crime and disease andvice; but still the practice of keeping childrenbarely alive at the charge of the communityis established; and there is no need for me toargue about it. I propose only two extensionsof the practice. One is to provide for all thechild’s reasonable human wants, on whichpoint, if you differ from me, I shall takeleave to say that you are socially a fool and

The Parents Intolerable Burden 161personally an inhuman wretch. The otheris that these wants should be supplied incomplete freedom from compulsory schoolingor compulsory anything except restraint fromcrime, though, as they can be supplied onlyby social organization, the child must beconscious of and subject to the conditions ofthat organization, which may involve suchportions of adult responsibility and duty as achild may be able to bear according to its age,and which will in any case prevent it fromforming the vagabond and anarchist habit ofmind.One more exception might be necessary:compulsory freedom. I am sure that a childshould not be imprisoned in a school. I amnot so sure that it should not sometimes bedriven out into the open—imprisoned in thewoods and on the mountains, as it were. Forthere are frowsty children, just as there arefrowsty adults, who dont want freedom. Thismorbid result of over-domestication would, letus hope, soon disappear with its cause.

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MobilizationThose who see no prospect held out to themby this except a country in which all thechildren shall be roaming savages, shouldconsider, first, whether their condition wouldbe any worse than that of the little cagedsavages of today, and second, whether eitherchildren or adults are so apt to run wild thatit is necessary to tether them fast to oneneighborhood to prevent a general dissolutionof society. My own observation leads meto believe that we are not half mobilizedenough. True, I cannot deny that we aremore mobile than we were. You will stillfind in the home counties old men who havenever been to London, and who tell you thatthey once went to Winchester or St Albansmuch as if they had been to the South Pole;but they are not so common as the clerk whohas been to Paris or to Lovely Lucerne, andwho “goes away somewhere” when he has aholiday. His grandfather never had a holiday,and, if he had, would no more have dreamedof crossing the Channel than of taking a box163

164 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenat the Opera. But with all allowance forthe Polytechnic excursion and the touristagency, our inertia is still appalling. I confessto having once spent nine years in Londonwithout putting my nose outside it; andthough this was better, perhaps, than therestless globe-trotting vagabondage of theidle rich, wandering from hotel to hotel andnever really living anywhere, yet I shouldno more have done it if I had been properlymobilized in my childhood than I should haveworn the same suit of clothes all that time(which, by the way, I very nearly did, myprofessional income not having as yet begunto sprout). There are masses of people whocould afford at least a trip to Margate, anda good many who could afford a trip roundthe world, who are more immovable thanAldgate pump. To others, who would moveif they knew how, travelling is surroundedwith imaginary difficulties and terrors. Inshort, the difficulty is not to fix people, butto root them up. We keep repeating thesilly proverb that a rolling stone gathers nomoss, as if moss were a desirable parasite.What we mean is that a vagabond does notprosper. Even this is not true, if prosperitymeans enjoyment as well as responsibilityand money. The real misery of vagabondageis the misery of having nothing to do andnowhere to go, the misery of being derelict ofGod and Man, the misery of the idle, poor

Mobilization 165or rich. And this is one of the miseries ofunoccupied childhood. The unoccupied adult,thus afflicted, tries many distractions whichare, to say the least, unsuited to children.But one of them, the distraction of seeingthe world, is innocent and beneficial. Alsoit is childish, being a continuation of whatnurses call “taking notice,” by which a childbecomes experienced. It is pitiable nowadaysto see men and women doing after the ageof 45 all the travelling and sightseeingthey should have done before they were 15.Mere wondering and staring at things is animportant part of a child’s education: thatis why children can be thoroughly mobilizedwithout making vagabonds of them. Avagabond is at home nowhere because hewanders: a child should wander becauseit ought to be at home everywhere. Andif it has its papers and its passports, andgets what it requires not by begging andpilfering, but from responsible agents ofthe community as of right, and with someformal acknowledgment of the obligationsit is incurring and a knowledge of the factthat these obligations are being recorded: if,further, certain qualifications are exactedbefore it is promoted from permission togo as far as its legs will carry it to usingmechanical aids to locomotion, it can roamwithout much danger of gypsification.Under such circumstances the boy or girl

166 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrencould always run away, and never be lost; andon no other conditions can a child be free withoutbeing also a homeless outcast.Parents could also run away from disagreeablechildren or drive them out of doors oreven drop their acquaintance, temporarily orpermanently, without inhumanity. Thus bothparties would be on their good behavior, andnot, as at present, on their filial or parentalbehavior, which, like all unfree behavior, ismostly bad behavior.As to what other results might follow, wehad better wait and see; for nobody now alivecan imagine what customs and institutionswould grow up in societies of free children.Child laws and child fashions, child mannersand child morals are now not tolerated; butamong free children there would certainly besurprising developments in this direction. Ido not think there would be any danger offree children behaving as badly as grown-uppeople do now because they have neverbeen free. They could hardly behave worse,anyhow.

Children’s Rightsand Parents’WrongsA very distinguished man once assured amother of my acquaintance that she wouldnever know what it meant to be hurt untilshe was hurt through her children. Childrenare extremely cruel without intending it;and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundredthe reason is that they do not conceive theirelders as having any human feelings. Servethe elders right, perhaps, for posing assuperhuman! The penalty of the impostor isnot that he is found out (he very seldom is)but that he is taken for what he pretends tobe, and treated as such. And to be treatedas anything but what you really are mayseem pleasant to the imagination whenthe treatment is above your merits; but inactual experience it is often quite the reverse.When I was a very small boy, my romanticimagination, stimulated by early doses of167

168 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenfiction, led me to brag to a still smaller boy sooutrageously that he, being a simple soul,really believed me to be an invincible hero.I cannot remember whether this pleasedme much; but I do remember very distinctlythat one day this admirer of mine, who hada pet goat, found the animal in the hands ofa larger boy than either of us, who mockedhim and refused to restore the animal to hisrightful owner. Whereupon, naturally, hecame weeping to me, and demanded that Ishould rescue the goat and annihilate theaggressor. My terror was beyond description:fortunately for me, it imparted such aghastliness to my voice and aspect as I underthe eye of my poor little dupe, advancedon the enemy with that hideous extremityof cowardice which is called the courageof despair, and said “You let go that goat,”that he abandoned his prey and fled, to myunforgettable, unspeakable relief. I havenever since exaggerated my prowess in bodilycombat.Now what happened to me in theadventure of the goat happens very often toparents, and would happen to schoolmastersif the prison door of the school did not shutout the trials of life. I remember once, atschool, the resident head master was broughtdown to earth by the sudden illness of hiswife. In the confusion that ensued it becamenecessary to leave one of the schoolrooms

Childrens Rights and Parents Wrongs 169without a master. I was in the class thatoccupied that schoolroom. To have sentus home would have been to break thefundamental bargain with our parents bywhich the school was bound to keep us outof their way for half the day at all hazards.Therefore an appeal had to be made toour better feelings: that is, to our commonhumanity, not to make a noise. But the headmaster had never admitted any commonhumanity with us. We had been carefullybroken in to regard him as a being quite alooffrom and above us: one not subject to erroror suffering or death or illness or mortality.Consequently sympathy was impossible; andif the unfortunate lady did not perish, itwas because, as I now comfort myself withguessing, she was too much pre-occupiedwith her own pains, and possibly making toomuch noise herself, to be conscious of thepandemonium downstairs.A great deal of the fiendishness of schoolboysand the cruelty of children to their eldersis produced just in this way. Elders cannotbe superhuman beings and suffering fellowcreaturesat the same time. If you pose as alittle god, you must pose for better for worse.

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How Little WeKnow About OurParentsThe relation between parent and child hascruel moments for the parent even whenmoney is no object, and the material worriesare delegated to servants and school teachers.The child and the parent are strangers to oneanother necessarily, because their ages mustdiffer widely. Read Goethe’s autobiography;and note that though he was happy in hisparents and had exceptional powers ofobservation, divination, and story-telling,he knew less about his father and motherthan about most of the other people hementions. I myself was never on bad termswith my mother: we lived together until I wasforty-two years old, absolutely without thesmallest friction of any kind; yet when herdeath set me thinking curiously about ourrelations, I realized that I knew very littleabout her. Introduce me to a strange woman171

172 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenwho was a child when I was a child, a girlwhen I was a boy, an adolescent when I wasan adolescent; and if we take naturally to oneanother I will know more of her and she ofme at the end of forty days (I had almost saidof forty minutes) than I knew of my motherat the end of forty years. A contemporarystranger is a novelty and an enigma, also apossibility; but a mother is like a broomstickor like the sun in the heavens, it does notmatter which as far as one’s knowledge ofher is concerned: the broomstick is there andthe sun is there; and whether the child isbeaten by it or warmed and enlightened byit, it accepts it as a fact in nature, and doesnot conceive it as having had youth, passions,and weaknesses, or as still growing, yearning,suffering, and learning. If I meet a widow Imay ask her all about her marriage; but whatson ever dreams of asking his mother abouther marriage, or could endure to hear of itwithout violently breaking off the old sacredrelationship between them, and ceasing to beher child or anything more to her than thefirst man in the street might be?Yet though in this sense the child cannotrealize its parent’s humanity, the parent canrealize the child’s; for the parents with theirexperience of life have none of the illusionsabout the child that the child has about theparents; and the consequence is that the childcan hurt its parents’ feelings much more than

How Little We Know About Our Parents 173its parents can hurt the child’s, because thechild, even when there has been none of thedeliberate hypocrisy by which children aretaken advantage of by their elders, cannotconceive the parent as a fellow-creature,whilst the parents know very well that thechildren are only themselves over again.The child cannot conceive that its blame orcontempt or want of interest could possiblyhurt its parent, and therefore expresses themall with an indifference which has given riseto the term enfant terrible (a tragic term inspite of the jests connected with it); whilstthe parent can suffer from such slights andreproaches more from a child than fromanyone else, even when the child is notbeloved, because the child is so unmistakablysincere in them.

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Our AbandonedMothersTake a very common instance of thisagonizing incompatibility. A widow bringsup her son to manhood. He meets a strangewoman, and goes off with and marries her,leaving his mother desolate. It does not occurto him that this is at all hard on her: hedoes it as a matter of course, and actuallyexpects his mother to receive, on terms ofspecial affection, the woman for whom shehas been abandoned. If he shewed any senseof what he was doing, any remorse; if hemingled his tears with hers and asked hernot to think too hardly of him because hehad obeyed the inevitable destiny of a manto leave his father and mother and cleaveto his wife, she could give him her blessingand accept her bereavement with dignity andwithout reproach. But the man never dreamsof such considerations. To him his mother’sfeeling in the matter, when she betrays it, isunreasonable, ridiculous, and even odious,175

176 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenas shewing a prejudice against his adorablebride.I have taken the widow as an extreme andobvious case; but there are many husbandsand wives who are tired of their consorts, ordisappointed in them, or estranged from themby infidelities; and these parents, in losing ason or a daughter through marriage, may belosing everything they care for. No parent’slove is as innocent as the love of a child: theexclusion of all conscious sexual feeling fromit does not exclude the bitterness, jealousy,and despair at loss which characterize sexualpassion: in fact, what is called a pure lovemay easily be more selfish and jealous thana carnal one. Anyhow, it is plain matter offact that naively selfish people sometimes trywith fierce jealousy to prevent their childrenmarrying.

Family AffectionUntil the family as we know it ceases toexist, nobody will dare to analyze parentalaffection as distinguished from that generalhuman sympathy which has secured to manyan orphan fonder care in a stranger’s housethan it would have received from its actualparents. Not even Tolstoy, in The KreutzerSonata, has said all that we suspect aboutit. When it persists beyond the period atwhich it ceases to be necessary to the child’swelfare, it is apt to be morbid; and we areprobably wrong to inculcate its deliberatecultivation. The natural course is for theparents and children to cast off the specificparental and filial relation when they are nolonger necessary to one another. The childdoes this readily enough to form fresh ties,closer and more fascinating. Parents are notalways excluded from such compensations: ithappens sometimes that when the childrengo out at the door the lover comes in at thewindow. Indeed it happens now oftener thanit used to, because people remain much177

178 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenlonger in the sexual arena. The cultivatedJewess no longer cuts off her hair at hermarriage. The British matron has discardedher cap and her conscientious ugliness; anda bishop’s wife at fifty has more of the airof a femme galante than an actress had atthirty-five in her grandmother’s time. Butas people marry later, the facts of age andtime still inexorably condemn most parentsto comparative solitude when their childrenmarry. This may be a privation and may bea relief: probably in healthy circumstancesit is no worse than a salutary change ofhabit; but even at that it is, for the momentat least, a wrench. For though parents andchildren sometimes dislike one another,there is an experience of succor and a habitof dependence and expectation formed ininfancy which naturally attaches a child toits parent or to its nurse (a foster parent) ina quite peculiar way. A benefit to the childmay be a burden to the parent; but peoplebecome attached to their burdens sometimesmore than the burdens are attached to them;and to “suffer little children” has become anaffectionate impulse deep in our nature.Now there is no such impulse to suffer oursisters and brothers, our aunts and uncles,much less our cousins. If we could choose ourrelatives, we might, by selecting congenialones, mitigate the repulsive effect of theobligation to like them and to admit them to

Family Affection 179our intimacy. But to have a person imposedon us as a brother merely because he happensto have the same parents is unbearable when,as may easily happen, he is the sort of personwe should carefully avoid if he were anyoneelse’s brother. All Europe (except Scotland,which has clans instead of families) drawsthe line at second cousins. Protestantismdraws it still closer by making the first cousina marriageable stranger; and the only reasonfor not drawing it at sisters and brothers isthat the institution of the family compels usto spend our childhood with them, and thusimposes on us a curious relation in whichfamiliarity destroys romantic charm, andis yet expected to create a specially warmaffection. Such a relation is dangerouslyfactitious and unnatural; and the practicalmoral is that the less said at home aboutspecific family affection the better. Children,like grown-up people, get on well enoughtogether if they are not pushed down oneanother’s throats; and grown-up relativeswill get on together in proportion to theirseparation and their care not to presumeon their blood relationship. We shouldlet children’s feelings take their naturalcourse without prompting. I have seen achild scolded and called unfeeling becauseit did not occur to it to make a theatricaldemonstration of affectionate delight whenits mother returned after an absence: a

180 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrentypical example of the way in which spuriousfamily sentiment is stoked up. We are, afterall, sociable animals; and if we are let alonein the matter of our affections, and wellbrought up otherwise, we shall not get onany the worse with particular people becausethey happen to be our brothers and sistersand cousins. The danger lies in assumingthat we shall get on any better.The main point to grasp here is that familiesare not kept together at present by familyfeeling but by human feeling. The family cultivatessympathy and mutual help and consolationas any other form of kindly associationcultivates them; but the addition of a dictatedcompulsory affection as an attribute ofnear kinship is not only unnecessary, but positivelydetrimental; and the alleged tendencyof modern social development to break up thefamily need alarm nobody. We cannot breakup the facts of kinship nor eradicate its naturalemotional consequences. What we cando and ought to do is to set people free to behavenaturally and to change their behavioras circumstances change. To impose on a citizenof London the family duties of a Highlandcateran in the eighteenth century is asabsurd as to compel him to carry a claymoreand target instead of an umbrella. The civilizedman has no special use for cousins; andhe may presently find that he has no specialuse for brothers and sisters. The parent seems

Family Affection 181likely to remain indispensable; but there is noreason why that natural tie should be madethe excuse for unnatural aggravations of it, ascrushing to the parent as they are oppressiveto the child. The mother and father will notalways have to shoulder the burthen of maintenancewhich should fall on the Atlas shouldersof the fatherland and motherland. Pendingsuch reforms and emancipations, a shatteringbreak-up of the parental home must remainone of the normal incidents of marriage.The parent is left lonely and the child is not.Woe to the old if they have no impersonal interests,no convictions, no public causes to advance,no tastes or hobbies! It is well to bea mother but not to be a mother-in-law; andif men were cut off artificially from intellectualand public interests as women are, thefather-in-law would be as deplorable a figurein popular tradition as the mother-in-law.It is not to be wondered at that somepeople hold that blood relationship should bekept a secret from the persons related, andthat the happiest condition in this respect isthat of the foundling who, if he ever meets hisparents or brothers or sisters, passes themby without knowing them. And for such aview there is this to be said: that our familysystem does unquestionably take the naturalbond between members of the same family,which, like all natural bonds, is not too tightto be borne, and superimposes on it a painful

182 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenburden of forced, inculcated, suggested,and altogether unnecessary affection andresponsibility which we should do well to getrid of by making relatives as independent ofone another as possible.

The Fate of theFamilyThe difficulty of inducing people to talksensibly about the family is the same as thatwhich I pointed out in a previous volume asconfusing discussions of marriage. Marriageis not a single invariable institution: itchanges from civilization to civilization, fromreligion to religion, from civil code to civilcode, from frontier to frontier. The familyis still more variable, because the numberof persons constituting a family, unlike thenumber of persons constituting a marriage,varies from one to twenty: indeed, whena widower with a family marries a widowwith a family, and the two produce a thirdfamily, even that very high number may besurpassed. And the conditions may varybetween opposite extremes: for example, ina London or Paris slum every child adds tothe burden of poverty and helps to starve theparents and all the other children, whereasin a settlement of pioneer colonists every183

184 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenchild, from the moment it is big enoughto lend a hand to the family industry, isan investment in which the only danger isthat of temporary over-capitalization. Thenthere are the variations in family sentiment.Sometimes the family organization is asfrankly political as the organization of anarmy or an industry: fathers being no moreexpected to be sentimental about theirchildren than colonels about soldiers, orfactory owners about their employees, thoughthe mother may be allowed a little tendernessif her character is weak. The Roman fatherwas a despot: the Chinese father is anobject of worship: the sentimental modernwestern father is often a play-fellow lookedto for toys and pocket-money. The farmersees his children constantly: the squire seesthem only during the holidays, and not thenoftener than he can help: the tram conductor,when employed by a joint stock company,sometimes never sees them at all.Under such circumstances phrases likeThe Influence of Home Life, The Family, TheDomestic Hearth, and so on, are no morespecific than The Mammals, or The Man InThe Street; and the pious generalizationsfounded so glibly on them by our sentimentalmoralists are unworkable. When householdsaverage twelve persons with the sexes aboutequally represented, the results may be fairlygood. When they average three the results

The Fate of the Family 185may be very bad indeed; and to lump thetwo together under the general term TheFamily is to confuse the question hopelessly.The modern small family is much too stuffy:children “brought up at home” in it are unfitfor society. But here again circumstancesdiffer. If the parents live in what is called agarden suburb, where there is a good dealof social intercourse, and the family, insteadof keeping itself to itself, as the evil oldsaying is, and glowering at the neighborsover the blinds of the long street in whichnobody knows his neighbor and everyonewishes to deceive him as to his income andsocial importance, is in effect broken up byschool life, by out-of-door habits, and by frankneighborly intercourse through dances andconcerts and theatricals and excursions andthe like, families of four may turn out muchless barbarous citizens than families of tenwhich attain the Boer ideal of being out ofsight of one another’s chimney smoke.All one can say is, roughly, that thehomelier the home, and the more familiar thefamily, the worse for everybody concerned.The family ideal is a humbug and a nuisance:one might as reasonably talk of the barrackideal, or the forecastle ideal, or any othersubstitution of the machinery of socialorganization for the end of it, which mustalways be the fullest and most capable life: inshort, the most godly life. And this significant

186 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenword reminds us that though the popularconception of heaven includes a Holy Family,it does not attach to that family the notionof a separate home, or a private nursery orkitchen or mother-in-law, or anything thatconstitutes the family as we know it. Evenblood relationship is miraculously abstractedfrom it; and the Father is the father ofall children, the mother the mother of allmothers and babies, and the Son the Sonof Man and the Savior of his brothers: onewhose chief utterance on the subject of theconventional family was an invitation to allof us to leave our families and follow him,and to leave the dead to bury the dead, andnot debauch ourselves at that gloomy festivalthe family funeral, with its sequel of hideousmourning and grief which is either affectedor morbid.

Family MourningI do not know how far this detestable customof mourning is carried in France; but judgingfrom the appearance of the French people Ishould say that a Frenchwoman goes intomourning for her cousins to the seventeenthdegree. The result is that when I cross theChannel I seem to have reached a countrydevastated by war or pestilence. It is reallysuffering only from the family. Will anyonepretend that England has not the best of thisstriking difference? Yet it is such senselessand unnatural conventions as this that makeus so impatient of what we call family feeling.Even apart from its insufferable pretensions,the family needs hearty discrediting; forthere is hardly any vulnerable part of it thatcould not be amputated with advantage.187

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Art TeachingBy art teaching I hasten to say that I do notmean giving children lessons in freehanddrawing and perspective. I am simplycalling attention to the fact that fine artis the only teacher except torture. I havealready pointed out that nobody, except underthreat of torture, can read a school book.The reason is that a school book is not awork of art. Similarly, you cannot listen toa lesson or a sermon unless the teacher orthe preacher is an artist. You cannot readthe Bible if you have no sense of literary art.The reason why the continental Europeanis, to the Englishman or American, sosurprisingly ignorant of the Bible, is that theauthorized English version is a great work ofliterary art, and the continental versions arecomparatively artless. To read a dull book;to listen to a tedious play or prosy sermonor lecture; to stare at uninteresting picturesor ugly buildings: nothing, short of disease,is more dreadful than this. The violencedone to our souls by it leaves injuries and189

190 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenproduces subtle maladies which have neverbeen properly studied by psycho-pathologists.Yet we are so inured to it in school, wherepractically all the teachers are bores tryingto do the work of artists, and all the booksartless, that we acquire a truly frightfulpower of enduring boredom. We even acquirethe notion that fine art is lascivious anddestructive to the character. In church, in theHouse of Commons, at public meetings, wesit solemnly listening to bores and twaddlersbecause from the time we could walk orspeak we have been snubbed, scolded,bullied, beaten and imprisoned wheneverwe dared to resent being bored or twaddledat, or to express our natural impatienceand derision of bores and twaddlers. Andwhen a man arises with a soul of sufficientnative strength to break the bonds of thisinculcated reverence and to expose andderide and tweak the noses of our humbugsand panjandrums, like Voltaire or Dickens,we are shocked and scandalized, even whenwe cannot help laughing. Worse, we dreadand persecute those who can see and declarethe truth, because their sincerity and insightreflects on our delusion and blindness. Weare all like Nell Gwynne’s footman, whodefended Nell’s reputation with his fists, notbecause he believed her to be what he calledan honest woman, but because he objected tobe scorned as the footman of one who was no

Art Teaching 191better than she should be.This wretched power of allowing ourselvesto be bored may seem to give the fine arts achance sometimes. People will sit through aperformance of Beethoven’s ninth symphonyor of Wagner’s Ring just as they will sitthrough a dull sermon or a front benchpolitician saying nothing for two hours whilsthis unfortunate country is perishing throughthe delay of its business in Parliament. Buttheir endurance is very bad for the ninthsymphony, because they never hiss when it ismurdered. I have heard an Italian conductor(no longer living) take the adagio of thatsymphony at a lively allegretto, slowing downfor the warmer major sections into the speedand manner of the heroine’s death song ina Verdi opera; and the listeners, far fromrelieving my excruciation by rising with yellsof fury and hurling their programs and operaglasses at the miscreant, behaved just asthey do when Richter conducts it. The massof imposture that thrives on this combinationof ignorance with despairing endurance isincalculable. Given a public trained fromchildhood to stand anything tedious, and sosaturated with school discipline that evenwith the doors open and no schoolmastersto stop them they will sit there helplesslyuntil the end of the concert or opera givesthem leave to go home; and you will havein great capitals hundreds of thousands of

192 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenpounds spent every night in the season onprofessedly artistic entertainments whichhave no other effect on fine art than toexacerbate the hatred in which it is alreadysecretly held in England.Fortunately, there are arts that cannot becut off from the people by bad performances.We can read books for ourselves; and we canplay a good deal of fine music for ourselveswith the help of a pianola. Nothing standsbetween us and the actual handwork of thegreat masters of painting except distance;and modern photographic methods ofreproduction are in some cases quite andin many nearly as effective in conveyingthe artist’s message as a modern editionof Shakespear’s plays is in conveying themessage that first existed in his handwriting.The reproduction of great feats of musicalexecution is already on the way: thephonograph, for all its wheezing and snarlingand braying, is steadily improving in itsmanners; and what with this improvementon the one hand, and on the other thatblessed selective faculty which enables us toignore a good deal of disagreeable noise ifthere is a thread of music in the middle ofit (few critics of the phonograph seem to beconscious of the very considerable mechanicalnoise set up by choirs and orchestras) wehave at last reached a point at which, forexample, a person living in an English

Art Teaching 193village where the church music is the onlymusic, and that music is made by a fewwell-intentioned ladies with the help of aharmonium, can hear masses by Palestrinavery passably executed, and can thereby beled to the discovery that Jackson in F andHymns Ancient and Modern are not perhapsthe last word of beauty and propriety in thepraise of God.In short, there is a vast body of art nowwithin the reach of everybody. The difficultyis that this art, which alone can educate usin grace of body and soul, and which alonecan make the history of the past live for usor the hope of the future shine for us, whichalone can give delicacy and nobility to ourcrude lusts, which is the appointed vehicle ofinspiration and the method of the communionof saints, is actually branded as sinful amongus because, wherever it arises, there isresistance to tyranny, breaking of fetters,and the breath of freedom. The attempt tosuppress art is not wholly successful: wemight as well try to suppress oxygen. Butit is carried far enough to inflict on hugenumbers of people a most injurious artstarvation, and to corrupt a great deal of theart that is tolerated. You will find in Englandplenty of rich families with little more culturethan their dogs and horses. And you will findpoor families, cut off by poverty and town lifefrom the contemplation of the beauty of the

194 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenearth, with its dresses of leaves, its scarves ofcloud, and its contours of hill and valley, whowould positively be happier as hogs, so littlehave they cultivated their humanity by theonly effective instrument of culture: art. Thedearth is artificially maintained even whenthere are the means of satisfying it. Storybooks are forbidden, picture post cards areforbidden, theatres are forbidden, operas areforbidden, circuses are forbidden, sweetmeatsare forbidden, pretty colors are forbidden, allexactly as vice is forbidden. The Creator isexplicitly prayed to, and implicitly convictedof indecency every day. An association of viceand sin with everything that is delightfuland of goodness with everything that iswretched and detestable is set up. Allthe most perilous (and glorious) appetitesand propensities are at once inflamed bystarvation and uneducated by art. All thewholesome conditions which art imposes onappetite are waived: instead of cultivatedmen and women restrained by a thousanddelicacies, repelled by ugliness, chilled byvulgarity, horrified by coarseness, deeplyand sweetly moved by the graces that arthas revealed to them and nursed in them,we get indiscrimmate rapacity in pursuitof pleasure and a parade of the grosseststimulations in catering for it. We have acontinual clamor for goodness, beauty, virtue,and sanctity, with such an appalling inability

Art Teaching 195to recognize it or love it when it arrives thatit is more dangerous to be a great prophet orpoet than to promote twenty companies forswindling simple folk out of their savings. Donot for a moment suppose that uncultivatedpeople are merely indifferent to high andnoble qualities. They hate them malignantly.At best, such qualities are like rare andbeautiful birds: when they appear the wholecountry takes down its guns; but the birdsreceive the statuary tribute of having theircorpses stuffed.And it really all comes from the habit ofpreventing children from being troublesome.You are so careful of your boy’s morals,knowing how troublesome they may be, thatyou keep him away from the Venus of Miloonly to find him in the arms of the scullerymaid or someone much worse. You decidethat the Hermes of Praxiteles and Wagner’sTristan are not suited for young girls; andyour daughter marries somebody appallinglyunlike either Hermes or Tristan solely toescape from your parental protection. Youhave not stifled a single passion nor averteda single danger: you have depraved thepassions by starving them, and brokendown all the defences which so effectivelyprotect children brought up in freedom. Youhave men who imagine themselves to beministers of religion openly declaring thatwhen they pass through the streets they

196 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenhave to keep out in the wheeled traffic toavoid the temptations of the pavement. Youhave them organizing hunts of the womenwho tempt them—poor creatures whom noartist would touch without a shudder—andwildly clamoring for more clothes to disguiseand conceal the body, and for the abolition ofpictures, statues, theatres, and pretty colors.And incredible as it seems, these unhappylunatics are left at large, unrebuked, evenadmired and revered, whilst artists have tostruggle for toleration. To them an undrapedhuman body is the most monstrous, themost blighting, the most obscene, the mostunbearable spectacle in the universe. To anartist it is, at its best, the most admirablespectacle in nature, and, at its average,an object of indifference. If every rag ofclothing miraculously dropped from theinhabitants of London at noon tomorrow (sayas a preliminary to the Great Judgment), theartistic people would not turn a hair; butthe artless people would go mad and call onthe mountains to hide them. I submit thatthis indicates a thoroughly healthy stateon the part of the artists, and a thoroughlymorbid one on the part of the artless. Andthe healthy state is attainable in a coldcountry like ours only by familiarity with theundraped figure acquired through pictures,statues, and theatrical representations inwhich an illusion of natural clotheslessness is

Art Teaching 197produced and made poetic.In short, we all grow up stupid and mad tojust the extent to which we have not been artisticallyeducated; and the fact that this taintof stupidity and madness has to be toleratedbecause it is general, and is even boasted ofas characteristically English, makes the situationall the worse. It is becoming exceedinglygrave at present, because the last ray of art isbeing cut off from our schools by the discontinuanceof religious education.

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The Impossibilityof SecularEducationNow children must be taught some sortof religion. Secular education is animpossibility. Secular education comes tothis: that the only reason for ceasing to doevil and learning to do well is that if you donot you will be caned. This is worse thanbeing taught in a church school that if youbecome a dissenter you will go to hell; for hellis presented as the instrument of somethingeternal, divine, and inevitable: you cannotevade it the moment the schoolmaster’s backis turned. What confuses this issue and leadseven highly intelligent religious persons toadvocate secular education as a means ofrescuing children from the strife of rivalproselytizers is the failure to distinguishbetween the child’s personal subjective needfor a religion and its right to an impartiallycommunicated historical objective knowledge199

200 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenof all the creeds and Churches. Just as achild, no matter what its race and color maybe, should know that there are black men andbrown men and yellow men, and, no matterwhat its political convictions may be, thatthere are Monarchists and Republicans andPositivists, Socialists and Unsocialists, so itshould know that there are Christians andMahometans and Buddhists and Shintoistsand so forth, and that they are on the averagejust as honest and well-behaved as its ownfather. For example, it should not be toldthat Allah is a false god set up by the Turksand Arabs, who will all be damned for takingthat liberty; but it should be told that manyEnglish people think so, and that manyTurks and Arabs think the converse aboutEnglish people. It should be taught thatAllah is simply the name by which God isknown to Turks and Arabs, who are justas eligible for salvation as any Christian.Further, that the practical reason why aTurkish child should pray in a mosque and anEnglish child in a church is that as worship isorganized in Turkey in mosques in the nameof Mahomet and in England in churches inthe name of Christ, a Turkish child joiningthe Church of England or an English childfollowing Mahomet will find that it has noplace for its worship and no organizationof its religion within its reach. Any otherteaching of the history and present facts of

The Impossibility of Secular Education 201religion is false teaching, and is politicallyextremely dangerous in an empire in whicha huge majority of the fellow subjects of thegoverning island do not profess the religion ofthat island.But this objectivity, though intellectuallyhonest, tells the child only what other peoplebelieve. What it should itself believe is quiteanother matter. The sort of Rationalismwhich says to a child “You must suspend yourjudgment until you are old enough to chooseyour religion” is Rationalism gone mad. Thechild must have a conscience and a code ofhonor (which is the essence of religion) evenif it be only a provisional one, to be revised atits confirmation. For confirmation is meant tosignalize a spiritual coming of age, and maybe a repudiation. Really active souls havemany confirmations and repudiations as theirlife deepens and their knowledge widens.But what is to guide the child before its firstconfirmation? Not mere orders, becauseorders must have a sanction of some sort orwhy should the child obey them? If, as aSecularist, you refuse to teach any sanction,you must say “You will be punished if youdisobey.” “Yes,” says the child to itself, “if I amfound out; but wait until your back is turnedand I will do as I like, and lie about it.” Therecan be no objective punishment for successfulfraud; and as no espionage can cover thewhole range of a child’s conduct, the upshot

202 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenis that the child becomes a liar and schemerwith an atrophied conscience. And a goodmany of the orders given to it are not obeyedafter all. Thus the Secularist who is not a foolis forced to appeal to the child’s vital impulsetowards perfection, to the divine spark; andno resolution not to call this impulse animpulse of loyalty to the Fellowship of theHoly Ghost, or obedience to the Will of God,or any other standard theological term, canalter the fact that the Secularist has steppedoutside Secularism and is educating the childreligiously, even if he insists on repudiatingthat pious adverb and substituting the wordmetaphysically.

Natural Selectionas a ReligionWe must make up our minds to it thereforethat whatever measures we may be forced totake to prevent the recruiting sergeants of theChurches, free or established, from obtainingan exclusive right of entry to schools, weshall not be able to exclude religion fromthem. The most horrible of all religions: thatwhich teaches us to regard ourselves as thehelpless prey of a series of senseless accidentscalled Natural Selection, is allowed andeven welcomed in so-called secular schoolsbecause it is, in a sense, the negation of allreligion; but for school purposes a religion isa belief which affects conduct; and no beliefaffects conduct more radically and often sodisastrously as the belief that the universeis a product of Natural Selection. What ismore, the theory of Natural Selection cannotbe kept out of schools, because many of thenatural facts that present the most plausibleappearance of design can be accounted for203

204 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenby Natural Selection; and it would be soabsurd to keep a child in delusive ignoranceof so potent a factor in evolution as to keepit in ignorance of radiation or capillaryattraction. Even if you make a religion ofNatural Selection, and teach the child toregard itself as the irresponsible prey of itscircumstances and appetites (or its heredityas you will perhaps call them), you will nonethe less find that its appetites are stimulatedby your encouragement and daunted by yourdiscouragement; that one of its appetites is anappetite for perfection; that if you discouragethis appetite and encourage the cruderacquisitive appetites the child will steal andlie and be a nuisance to you; and that if youencourage its appetite for perfection andteach it to attach a peculiar sacredness toit and place it before the other appetites, itwill be a much nicer child and you will havea much easier job, at which point you will,in spite of your pseudoscientific jargon, findyourself back in the old-fashioned religiousteaching as deep as Dr. Watts and in factfathoms deeper.

Moral InstructionLeaguesAnd now the voices of our Moral InstructionLeagues will be lifted, asking whether thereis any reason why the appetite for perfectionshould not be cultivated in rationally scientificterms instead of being associated with thestory of Jonah and the great fish and the thousandother tales that grow up round religions.Yes: there are many reasons; and one of themis that children all like the story of Jonah andthe whale (they insist on its being a whalein spite of demonstrations by Bible smasherswithout any sense of humor that Jonah wouldnot have fitted into a whale’s gullet—as if thestory would be credible of a whale with an enlargedthroat) and that no child on earth canstand moral instruction books or catechismsor any other statement of the case for religionin abstract terms. The object of a moralinstruction book is not to be rational, scientific,exact, proof against controversy, nor evencredible: its object is to make children good;205

206 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenand if it makes them sick instead its place isthe waste-paper basket.Take for an illustration the story of Elishaand the bears. To the authors of the moralinstruction books it is in the last degree reprehensible.It is obviously not true as a recordof fact; and the picture it gives us of the temperof God (which is what interests an adultreader) is shocking and blasphemous. But it isa capital story for a child. It interests a childbecause it is about bears; and it leaves thechild with an impression that children whopoke fun at old gentlemen and make rude remarksabout bald heads are not nice children,which is a highly desirable impression, andjust as much as a child is capable of receivingfrom the story. When a story is about Godand a child, children take God for granted andcriticize the child. Adults do the opposite, andare thereby led to talk great nonsense aboutthe bad effect of Bible stories on infants.But let no one think that a child or anyoneelse can learn religion from a teacher ora book or by any academic process whatever.It is only by an unfettered access to the wholebody of Fine Art: that is, to the whole body ofinspired revelation, that we can build up thatconception of divinity to which all virtue is anaspiration. And to hope to find this body of artpurified from all that is obsolete or dangerousor fierce or lusty, or to pick and choose whatwill be good for any particular child, much less

Moral Instruction Leagues 207for all children, is the shallowest of vanities.Such schoolmasterly selection is neither possiblenor desirable. Ignorance of evil is notvirtue but imbecility: admiring it is like givinga prize for honesty to a man who has notstolen your watch because he did not knowyou had one. Virtue chooses good from evil;and without knowledge there can be no choice.And even this is a dangerous simplification ofwhat actually occurs. We are not choosing: weare growing. Were you to cut all of what youcall the evil out of a child, it would drop dead.If you try to stretch it to full human staturewhen it is ten years old, you will simply pullit into two pieces and be hanged. And whenyou try to do this morally, which is what parentsand schoolmasters are doing every day,you ought to be hanged; and some day, whenwe take a sensible view of the matter, you willbe; and serve you right. The child does notstand between a good and a bad angel: whatit has to deal with is a middling angel who, innormal healthy cases, wants to be a good angelas fast as it can without killing itself in theprocess, which is a dangerous one.Therefore there is no question of providingthe child with a carefully regulated accessto good art. There is no good art, any morethan there is good anything else in the absolutesense. Art that is too good for the childwill either teach it nothing or drive it mad,as the Bible has driven many people mad who

208 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenmight have kept their sanity had they beenallowed to read much lower forms of literature.The practical moral is that we must readwhatever stories, see whatever pictures, hearwhatever songs and symphonies, go to whateverplays we like. We shall not like thosewhich have nothing to say to us; and thougheveryone has a right to bias our choice, no onehas a right to deprive us of it by keeping usfrom any work of art or any work of art fromus.I may now say without danger of beingmisunderstood that the popular Englishcompromise called Cowper Templeism(unsectarian Bible education) is not so sillyas it looks. It is true that the Bible inculcateshalf a dozen religions: some of thembarbarous; some cynical and pessimistic;some amoristic and romantic; some scepticaland challenging; some kindly, simple, andintuitional; some sophistical and intellectual;none suited to the character and conditionsof western civilization unless it be theChristianity which was finally suppressed bythe Crucifixion, and has never been put intopractice by any State before or since. But theBible contains the ancient literature of a veryremarkable Oriental race; and the impositionof this literature, on whatever false pretences,on our children left them more literate than ifthey knew no literature at all, which was thepractical alternative. And as our Authorized

Moral Instruction Leagues 209Version is a great work of art as well, to knowit was better than knowing no art, which alsowas the practical alternative. It is at leastnot a school book; and it is not a bad storybook, horrible as some of the stories are.Therefore as between the Bible and the blankrepresented by secular education, the choiceis with the Bible.

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The BibleBut the Bible is not sufficient. The realBible of modern Europe is the whole bodyof great literature in which the inspirationand revelation of Hebrew Scripture has beencontinued to the present day. Nietzsche’sThus Spake Zoroaster is less comforting tothe ill and unhappy than the Psalms; but it ismuch truer, subtler, and more edifying. Thepleasure we get from the rhetoric of the bookof Job and its tragic picture of a bewilderedsoul cannot disguise the ignoble irrelevanceof the retort of God with which it closes, orsupply the need of such modern revelationsas Shelley’s Prometheus or The Niblung’sRing of Richard Wagner. There is nothingin the Bible greater in inspiration thanBeethoven’s ninth symphony; and the powerof modern music to convey that inspirationto a modern man is far greater than that ofElizabethan English, which is, except forpeople steeped in the Bible from childhoodlike Sir Walter Scott and Ruskin, a deadlanguage.211

212 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and ChildrenBesides, many who have no ear forliterature or for music are accessible toarchitecture, to pictures, to statues, todresses, and to the arts of the stage. Everydevice of art should be brought to bear on theyoung; so that they may discover some formof it that delights them naturally; for therewill come to all of them that period betweendawning adolescence and full maturity whenthe pleasures and emotions of art will have tosatisfy cravings which, if starved or insulted,may become morbid and seek disgracefulsatisfactions, and, if prematurely gratifiedotherwise than poetically, may destroy thestamina of the race. And it must be borne inmind that the most dangerous art for thisnecessary purpose is the art that presentsitself as religious ecstasy. Young peopleare ripe for love long before they are ripefor religion. Only a very foolish personwould substitute the Imitation of Christ forTreasure Island as a present for a boy or girl,or for Byron’s Don Juan as a present for aswain or lass. Pickwick is the safest saintfor us in our nonage. Flaubert’s Temptationof St Anthony is an excellent book for a manof fifty, perhaps the best within reach as ahealthy study of visionary ecstasy; but forthe purposes of a boy of fifteen Ivanhoe andthe Templar make a much better saint anddevil. And the boy of fifteen will find this outfor himself if he is allowed to wander in a

The Bible 213well-stocked literary garden, and hear bandsand see pictures and spend his pennies oncinematograph shows. His choice may oftenbe rather disgusting to his elders when theywant him to choose the best before he is readyfor it. The greatest Protestant Manifestoever written, as far as I know, is HoustonChamberlain’s Foundations of the NineteenthCentury: everybody capable of it should readit. Probably the History of Maria Monk isat the opposite extreme of merit (this is aguess: I have never read it); but it is certainthat a boy let loose in a library would go forMaria Monk and have no use whatever forMr Chamberlain. I should probably haveread Maria Monk myself if I had not had theArabian Nights and their like to occupy mebetter. In art, children, like adults, will findtheir level if they are left free to find it, andnot restricted to what adults think good forthem. Just at present our young people aregoing mad over ragtimes, apparently becausesyncopated rhythms are new to them. If theyhad learnt what can be done with syncopationfrom Beethoven’s third Leonora overture,they would enjoy the ragtimes all the more;but they would put them in their proper placeas amusing vulgarities.

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Artist IdolatryBut there are more dangerous influences thanragtimes waiting for people brought up inignorance of fine art. Nothing is more pitiablyridiculous than the wild worship of artists bythose who have never been seasoned in youthto the enchantments of art. Tenors and primadonnas, pianists and violinists, actors andactresses enjoy powers of seduction which inthe middle ages would have exposed themto the risk of being burnt for sorcery. But asthey exercise this power by singing, playing,and acting, no great harm is done exceptperhaps to themselves. Far graver are thepowers enjoyed by brilliant persons who arealso connoisseurs in art. The influence theycan exercise on young people who have beenbrought up in the darkness and wretchednessof a home without art, and in whom a naturalbent towards art has always been baffled andsnubbed, is incredible to those who have notwitnessed and understood it. He (or she)who reveals the world of art to them opensheaven to them. They become satellites,215

216 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrendisciples, worshippers of the apostle. Nowthe apostle may be a voluptuary withoutmuch conscience. Nature may have givenhim enough virtue to suffice in a reasonableenvironment. But this allowance may not beenough to defend him against the temptationand demoralization of finding himself alittle god on the strength of what ought tobe a quite ordinary culture. He may findadorers in all directions in our uncultivatedsociety among people of stronger characterthan himself, not one of whom, if they hadbeen artistically educated, would have hadanything to learn from him or regarded himas in any way extraordinary apart from hisactual achievements as an artist. Tartuffe isnot always a priest. Indeed he is not alwaysa rascal: he is often a weak man absurdlycredited with omniscience and perfection,and taking unfair advantages only becausethey are offered to him and he is too weak torefuse. Give everyone his culture, and no onewill offer him more than his due.In thus delivering our children from theidolatry of the artist, we shall not destroyfor them the enchantment of art: on thecontrary, we shall teach them to demandart everywhere as a condition attainable bycultivating the body, mind, and heart. Art,said Morris, is the expression of pleasure inwork. And certainly, when work is madedetestable by slavery, there is no art. It

Artist Idolatry 217is only when learning is made a slaveryby tyrannical teachers that art becomesloathsome to the pupil.“The Machine”When we set to work at a Constitution tosecure freedom for children, we had betterbear in mind that the children may not beat all obliged to us for our pains. Rousseausaid that men are born free; and this saying,in its proper bearings, was and is a greatand true saying; yet let it not lead us intothe error of supposing that all men long forfreedom and embrace it when it is offered tothem. On the contrary, it has to be forced onthem; and even then they will give it the slipif it is not religiously inculcated and stronglysafeguarded.Besides, men are born docile, and must inthe nature of things remain so with regardto everything they do not understand. Nowpolitical science and the art of govemmentare among the things they do not understand,and indeed are not at present allowed tounderstand. They can be enslaved by asystem, as we are at present, because ithappens to be there, and nobody understandsit. An intelligently worked Capitalist system,as Comte saw, would give us all that mostof us are intelligent enough to want. Whatmakes it produce such unspeakably vileresults is that it is an automatic systemwhich is as little understood by those who

218 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenprofit by it in money as by those who arestarved and degraded by it: our millionairesand statesmen are manifestly no more“captains of industry” or scientific politiciansthan our bookmakers are mathematicians.For some time past a significant word hasbeen coming into use as a substitute forDestiny, Fate, and Providence. It is “TheMachine”: the machine that has no god in it.Why do governments do nothing in spite ofreports of Royal Commissions that establishthe most frightful urgency? Why do ourphilanthropic millionaires do nothing, thoughthey are ready to throw bucketfuls of goldinto the streets? The Machine will not letthem. Always the Machine. In short, theydont know how.They try to reform Society as an old ladymight try to restore a broken down locomotiveby prodding it with a knitting needle. Andthis is not at all because they are born fools,but because they have been educated, not intomanhood and freedom, but into blindness andslavery by their parents and schoolmasters,themselves the victims of a similar misdirection,and consequently of The Machine. Theydo not want liberty. They have not been educatedto want it. They choose slavery and inequality;and all the other evils are automaticallyadded to them.And yet we must have The Machine. It isonly in unskilled hands under ignorant direc-

Artist Idolatry 219tion that machinery is dangerous. We can nomore govern modern communities without politicalmachinery than we can feed and clothethem without industrial machinery. ShatterThe Machine, and you get Anarchy. And yetThe Machine works so detestably at presentthat we have people who advocate Anarchyand call themselves Anarchists.

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The Provocation toAnarchismWhat is valid in Anarchism is that allGovernments try to simplify their task bydestroying liberty and glorifying authority ingeneral and their own deeds in particular.But the difficulty in combining law and orderwith free institutions is not a natural one.It is a matter of inculcation. If people arebrought up to be slaves, it is useless anddangerous to let them loose at the age oftwenty-one and say “Now you are free.” Noone with the tamed soul and broken spirit of aslave can be free. It is like saying to a laborerbrought up on a family income of thirteenshillings a week, “Here is one hundredthousand pounds: now you are wealthy.”Nothing can make such a man really wealthy.Freedom and wealth are difficult andresponsible conditions to which men must beaccustomed and socially trained from birth.A nation that is free at twenty-one is not freeat all; just as a man first enriched at fifty221

222 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenremains poor all his life, even if he does notcurtail it by drinking himself to death in thefirst wild ecstasy of being able to swallow asmuch as he likes for the first time. You cannotgovern men brought up as slaves otherwisethan as slaves are governed. You may pileBills of Right and Habeas Corpus Actson Great Charters; promulgate AmericanConstitutions; burn the chateaux andguillotine the seigneurs; chop off the heads ofkings and queens and set up Democracy onthe ruins of feudalism: the end of it all forus is that already in the twentieth centurythere has been as much brute coercion andsavage intolerance, as much flogging andhanging, as much impudent injustice on thebench and lustful rancor in the pulpit, asmuch naïve resort to torture, persecution,and suppression of free speech and freedomof the press, as much war, as much of thevilest excess of mutilation, rapine, anddelirious indiscriminate slaughter of helplessnon-combatants, old and young, as muchprostitution of professional talent, literaryand political, in defence of manifest wrong, asmuch cowardly sycophancy giving fine namesto all this villainy or pretending that it is“greatly exaggerated,” as we can find anyrecord of from the days when the advocacy ofliberty was a capital offence and Democracywas hardly thinkable. Democracy exhibitsthe vanity of Louis XIV, the savagery of Peter

The Provocation to Anarchism 223of Russia, the nepotism and provinciality ofNapoleon, the fickleness of Catherine II: inshort, all the childishnesses of all the despotswithout any of the qualities that enabled thegreatest of them to fascinate and dominatetheir contemporaries.And the flatterers of Democracy are as impudentlyservile to the successful, and insolentto common honest folk, as the flatterersof the monarchs. Democracy in America hasled to the withdrawal of ordinary refined personsfrom politics; and the same result is comingin England as fast as we make Democracyas democratic as it is in America. Thisis true also of popular religion: it is so horriblyirreligious that nobody with the smallestpretence to culture, or the least inkling ofwhat the great prophets vainly tried to makethe world understand, will have anything todo with it except for purely secular reasons.

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ImaginationBefore we can clearly understand how balefulis this condition of intimidation in which welive, it is necessary to clear up the confusionmade by our use of the word imagination todenote two very different powers of mind.One is the power to imagine things as theyare not: this I call the romantic imagination.The other is the power to imagine thingsas they are without actually sensing them;and this I will call the realistic imagination.Take for example marriage and war. Oneman has a vision of perpetual bliss witha domestic angel at home, and of flashingsabres, thundering guns, victorious cavalrycharges, and routed enemies in the field. Thatis romantic imagination; and the mischiefit does is incalculable. It begins in sillyand selfish expectations of the impossible,and ends in spiteful disappointment, sourgrievance, cynicism, and misanthropicresistance to any attempt to better a hopelessworld. The wise man knows that imaginationis not only a means of pleasing himself225

226 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenand beguiling tedious hours with romancesand fairy tales and fools’ paradises (a quitedefensible and delightful amusement whenyou know exactly what you are doing andwhere fancy ends and facts begin), but alsoa means of foreseeing and being preparedfor realities as yet unexperienced, and oftesting the possibility and desirability ofserious Utopias. He does not expect his wifeto be an angel; nor does he overlook thefacts that war depends on the rousing of allthe murderous blackguardism still latent inmankind; that every victory means a defeat;that fatigue, hunger, terror, and disease arethe raw material which romancers work upinto military glory; and that soldiers for themost part go to war as children go to school,because they are afraid not to. They areafraid even to say they are afraid, as suchcandor is punishable by death in the militarycode.A very little realistic imagination givesan ambitious person enormous power overthe multitudinous victims of the romanticimagination. For the romancer not onlypleases himself with fictitious glories: he alsoterrifies himself with imaginary dangers. Hedoes not even picture what these dangersare: he conceives the unknown as alwaysdangerous. When you say to a realist “Youmust do this” or “You must not do that,” heinstantly asks what will happen to him if

Imagination 227he does (or does not, as the case may be).Failing an unromantic convincing answer,he does just as he pleases unless he canfind for himself a real reason for refraining.In short, though you can intimidate him,you cannot bluff him. But you can alwaysbluff the romantic person: indeed his graspof real considerations is so feeble that youfind it necessary to bluff him even whenyou have solid considerations to offer himinstead. The campaigns of Napoleon, withtheir atmosphere of glory, illustrate this. Inthe Russian campaign Napoleon’s marshalsachieved miracles of bluff, especially Ney,who, with a handful of men, monstrouslyoutnumbered, repeatedly kept the Russiantroops paralyzed with terror by pure bounce.Napoleon himself, much more a realist thanNey (that was why he dominated him), wouldprobably have surrendered; for sometimesthe bravest of the brave will achievesuccesses never attempted by the cleverestof the clever. Wellington was a completerrealist than Napoleon. It was impossible topersuade Wellington that he was beaten untilhe actually was beaten. He was unbluffable;and if Napoleon had understood the natureof Wellington’s strength instead of returningWellington’s snobbish contempt for him by anacademic contempt for Wellington, he wouldnot have left the attack at Waterloo to Neyand D’Erlon, who, on that field, did not know

228 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenwhen they were beaten, whereas Wellingtonknew precisely when he was not beaten. Theunbluffable would have triumphed anyhow,probably, because Napoleon was an academicsoldier, doing the academic thing (the attackin columns and so forth) with superlativeability and energy; whilst Wellington was anoriginal soldier who, instead of outdoing theterrible academic columns with still moreterrible and academic columns, outwittedthem with the thin red line, not of heroes,but, as this uncompromising realist neverhesitated to testify, of the scum of the earth.

Government byBulliesThese picturesque martial incidents arebeing reproduced every day in our ordinarylife. We are bluffed by hardy simpletonsand headstrong bounders as the Russianswere bluffed by Ney; and our Wellingtons arethreadbound by slave-democracy as Gulliverwas threadbound by the Lilliputians. Weare a mass of people living in a submissiveroutine to which we have been drilled fromour childhood. When you ask us to takethe simplest step outside that routine, wesay shyly, “Oh, I really couldnt,” or “Oh, Ishouldnt like to,” without being able to pointout the smallest harm that could possiblyensue: victims, not of a rational fear ofreal dangers, but of pure abstract fear, thequintessence of cowardice, the very negationof “the fear of God.” Dotted about among usare a few spirits relatively free from thisinculcated paralysis, sometimes becausethey are half-witted, sometimes because229

230 A <strong>Treatise</strong> on Parents and Childrenthey are unscrupulously selfish, sometimesbecause they are realists as to money andunimaginative as to other things, sometimeseven because they are exceptionally able,but always because they are not afraid ofshadows nor oppressed with nightmares. Andwe see these few rising as if by magic intopower and affluence, and forming, with themillionaires who have accidentally gainedhuge riches by the occasional windfalls ofour commerce, the governing class. Nownothing is more disastrous than a governingclass that does not know how to govern. Andhow can this rabble of the casual productsof luck, cunning, and folly, be expected toknow how to govern? The merely lucky onesand the hereditary ones do not owe theirposition to their qualifications at all. Asto the rest, the realism which seems theiressential qualification often consists not onlyin a lack of romantic imagination, which lackis a merit, but of the realistic, constructive,Utopian imagination, which lack is a ghastlydefect. Freedom from imaginative illusionis therefore no guarantee whatever ofnobility of character: that is why inculcatedsubmissiveness makes us slaves to peoplemuch worse than ourselves, and why it is soimportant that submissiveness should nolonger be inculcated.And yet as long as you have thecompulsory school as we know it, we shall

Government by Bullies 231have submissiveness inculcated. What ismore, until the active hours of child life areorganized separately from the active hoursof adult life, so that adults can enjoy thesociety of children in reason without beingtormented, disturbed, harried, burdened,and hindered in their work by them as theywould be now if there were no compulsoryschools and no children hypnotized into thebelief that they must tamely go to them andbe imprisoned and beaten and over-taskedin them, we shall have schools under onepretext or another; and we shall have allthe evil consequences and all the socialhopelessness that result from turning anation of potential freemen and freewomeninto a nation of two-legged spoilt spanielswith everything crushed out of their natureexcept dread of the whip. Liberty is thebreath of life to nations; and liberty is the onething that parents, schoolmasters, and rulersspend their lives in extirpating for the sake ofan immediately quiet and finally disastrouslife.