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\title{A Treatise on Parents and Children}

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\title{A Treatise on Parents and Children}


\author{George Bernard Shaw}

\maketitle
\frontmatter
{\footnotesize \tableofcontents{}}\newpage


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Prefatory Materials}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Prefatory Materials}

This public-domain text was scanned and proofed by Ronald Burkey and
Amy Thomte. It was subsequently converted to LaTex by \textbf{GutenMark}
software, and then re-edited with \textbf{lyx} software. If you find
any errors please report them to info@birdsproject.org.

Punctuation and spelling retained as in the printed text. Shaw intentionally
spelled many words according to a non-standard system. For example,
{}``dont'' is given as {}``dont'' (without apostrophe), {}``Dr.''
is given as {}``Dr'' (without a period at the end), and {}``Shakespeare''
is given as {}``Shakespear'' (no {}``e'' at the end).

\mainmatter


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Trailing Clouds of Glory}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Trailing Clouds of Glory}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Trailing Clouds of Glory}

Childhood is a stage in the process of that continual remanufacture
of the Life Stuff by which the human race is perpetuated. The Life
Force either will not or cannot achieve immortality except in very
low organisms: indeed it is by no means ascertained that even the
amoeba is immortal. Human beings visibly wear out, though they last
longer than their friends the dogs. Turtles, parrots, and elephants
are believed to be capable of outliving the memory of the oldest human
inhabitant. But the fact that new ones are born conclusively proves
that they are not immortal. Do away with death and you do away with
the need for birth: in fact if you went on breeding, you would finally
have to kill old people to make room for young ones.

Now death is not necessarily a failure of energy on the part of the
Life Force. People with no imagination try to make things which will
last for ever, and even want to live for ever themselves. But the
intelligently imaginative man knows very well that it is waste of
labor to make a machine that will last ten years, because it will
probably be superseded in half that time by an improved machine answering
the same purpose. He also knows that if some devil were to convince
us that our dream of personal immortality is no dream but a hard fact,
such a shriek of despair would go up from the human race as no other
conceivable horror could provoke. With all our perverse nonsense as
to John Smith living for a thousand million eons and for ever after,
we die voluntarily, knowing that it is time for us to be scrapped,
to be remanufactured, to come back, as Wordsworth divined, trailing
ever brightening clouds of glory. We must all be born again, and yet
again and again. We should like to live a little longer just as we
should like 50 pounds: that is, we should take it if we could get
it for nothing; but that sort of idle liking is not will. It is amazing---considering
the way we talk---how little a man will do to get 50 pounds: all the
50-pound notes I have ever known of have been more easily earned than
a laborious sixpence; but the difficulty of inducing a man to make
any serious effort to obtain 50 pounds is nothing to the difficulty
of inducing him to make a serious effort to keep alive. The moment
he sees death approach, he gets into bed and sends for a doctor. He
knows very well at the back of his conscience that he is rather a
poor job and had better be remanufactured. He knows that his death
will make room for a birth; and he hopes that it will be a birth of
something that he aspired to be and fell short of. He knows that it
is through death and rebirth that this corruptible shall become incorruptible,
and this mortal put on immortality. Practise as you will on his ignorance,
his fears, and his imagination, with bribes of paradises and threats
of hells, there is only one belief that can rob death of its sting
and the grave of its victory; and that is the belief that we can lay
down the burden of our wretched little makeshift individualities for
ever at each lift towards the goal of evolution, which can only be
a being that cannot be improved upon. After all, what man is capable
of the insane self-conceit of believing that an eternity of himself
would be tolerable even to himself? Those who try to believe it postulate
that they shall be made perfect first. But if you make me perfect
I shall no longer be myself, nor will it be possible for me to conceive
my present imperfections (and what I cannot conceive I cannot remember);
so that you may just as well give me a new name and face the fact
that I am a new person and that the old Bernard Shaw is as dead as
mutton. Thus, oddly enough, the conventional belief in the matter
comes to this: that if you wish to live for ever you must be wicked
enough to be irretrievably damned, since the saved are no longer what
they were, and in hell alone do people retain their sinful nature:
that is to say, their individuality. And this sort of hell, however
convenient as a means of intimidating persons who have practically
no honor and no conscience, is not a fact. Death is for many of us
the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on
the way in. Therefore let us give up telling one another idle stories,
and rejoice in death as we rejoice in birth; for without death we
cannot be born again; and the man who does not wish to be born again
and born better is fit only to represent the City of London in Parliament,
or perhaps the university of Oxford.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright The Child is Father to the Man}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{The Child is Father to the Man}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{The Child is Father
to the Man}

Is he? Then in the name of common sense why do we always treat children
on the assumption that the man is father to the child? Oh, these fathers!
And we are not content with fathers: we must have godfathers, forgetting
that the child is godfather to the man. Has it ever struck you as
curious that in a country where the first article of belief is that
every child is born with a godfather whom we all call {}``our father
which art in heaven,'' two very limited individual mortals should
be allowed to appear at its baptism and explain that they are its
godparents, and that they will look after its salvation until it is
no longer a child. I had a godmother who made herself responsible
in this way for me. She presented me with a Bible with a gilt clasp
and edges, larger than the Bibles similarly presented to my sisters,
because my sex entitled me to a heavier article. I must have seen
that lady at least four times in the twenty years following. She never
alluded to my salvation in any way. People occasionally ask me to
act as godfather to their children with a levity which convinces me
that they have not the faintest notion that it involves anything more
than calling the helpless child George Bernard without regard to the
possibility that it may grow up in the liveliest abhorrence of my
notions.

A person with a turn for logic might argue that if God is the Father
of all men, and if the child is father to the man, it follows that
the true representative of God at the christening is the child itself.
But such posers are unpopular, because they imply that our little
customs, or, as we often call them, our religion, mean something,
or must originally have meant something, and that we understand and
believe that something.

However, my business is not to make confusion worse confounded, but
to clear it up. Only, it is as well to begin by a sample of current
thought and practice which shews that on the subject of children we
are very deeply confused. On the whole, whatever our theory or no
theory may be, our practice is to treat the child as the property
of its immediate physical parents, and to allow them to do what they
like with it as far as it will let them. It has no rights and no liberties:
in short, its condition is that which adults recognize as the most
miserable and dangerous politically possible for themselves: namely,
the condition of slavery. For its alleviation we trust to the natural
affection of the parties, and to public opinion. A father cannot for
his own credit let his son go in rags. Also, in a very large section
of the population, parents finally become dependent on their children.
Thus there are checks on child slavery which do not exist, or are
less powerful, in the case of manual and industrial slavery. Sensationally
bad cases fall into two classes, which are really the same class:
namely, the children whose parents are excessively addicted to the
sensual luxury of petting children, and the children whose parents
are excessively addicted to the sensual luxury of physically torturing
them. There is a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children
which has effectually made an end of our belief that mothers are any
more to be trusted than stepmothers, or fathers than slave-drivers.
And there is a growing body of law designed to prevent parents from
using their children ruthlessly to make money for the household. Such
legislation has always been furiously resisted by the parents, even
when the horrors of factory slavery were at their worst; and the extension
of such legislation at present would be impossible if it were not
that the parents affected by it cannot control a majority of votes
in Parliament. In domestic life a great deal of service is done by
children, the girls acting as nursemaids and general servants, and
the lads as errand boys. In the country both boys and girls do a substantial
share of farm labor. This is why it is necessary to coerce poor parents
to send their children to school, though in the relatively small class
which keeps plenty of servants it is impossible to induce parents
to keep their children at home instead of paying schoolmasters to
take them off their hands.

It appears then that the bond of affection between parents and children
does not save children from the slavery that denial of rights involves
in adult political relations. It sometimes intensifies it, sometimes
mitigates it; but on the whole children and parents confront one another
as two classes in which all the political power is on one side; and
the results are not at all unlike what they would be if there were
no immediate consanguinity between them, and one were white and the
other black, or one enfranchised and the other disenfranchised, or
one ranked as gentle and the other simple. Not that Nature counts
for nothing in the case and political rights for everything. But a
denial of political rights, and the resultant delivery of one class
into the mastery of another, affects their relations so extensively
and profoundly that it is impossible to ascertain what the real natural
relations of the two classes are until this political relation is
abolished.


\chapter*{What is a Child?}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{What is a Child?}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{What is a Child?}

An experiment. A fresh attempt to produce the just man made perfect:
that is, to make humanity divine. And you will vitiate the experiment
if you make the slightest attempt to abort it into some fancy figure
of your own: for example, your notion of a good man or a womanly woman.
If you treat it as a little wild beast to be tamed, or as a pet to
be played with, or even as a means to save you trouble and to make
money for you (and these are our commonest ways), it may fight its
way through in spite of you and save its soul alive; for all its instincts
will resist you, and possibly be strengthened in the resistance; but
if you begin with its own holiest aspirations, and suborn them for
your own purposes, then there is hardly any limit to the mischief
you may do. Swear at a child, throw your boots at it, send it flying
from the room with a cuff or a kick; and the experience will be as
instructive to the child as a difficulty with a short-tempered dog
or a bull. Francis Place tells us that his father always struck his
children when he found one within his reach. The effect on the young
Places seems to have been simply to make them keep out of their father's
way, which was no doubt what he desired, as far as he desired anything
at all. Francis records the habit without bitterness, having reason
to thank his stars that his father respected the inside of his head
whilst cuffing the outside of it; and this made it easy for Francis
to do yeoman's service to his country as that rare and admirable thing,
a Freethinker: the only sort of thinker, I may remark, whose thoughts,
and consequently whose religious convictions, command any respect.

Now Mr Place, senior, would be described by many as a bad father;
and I do not contend that he was a conspicuously good one. But as
compared with the conventional good father who deliberately imposes
himself on his son as a god; who takes advantage of childish credulity
and parent worship to persuade his son that what he approves of is
right and what he disapproves of is wrong; who imposes a corresponding
conduct on the child by a system of prohibitions and penalties, rewards
and eulogies, for which he claims divine sanction: compared to this
sort of abortionist and monster maker, I say, Place appears almost
as a Providence. Not that it is possible to live with children any
more than with grown-up people without imposing rules of conduct on
them. There is a point at which every person with human nerves has
to say to a child {}``Stop that noise.'' But suppose the child asks
why! There are various answers in use. The simplest: {}``Because
it irritates me,'' may fail; for it may strike the child as being
rather amusing to irritate you; also the child, having comparatively
no nerves, may be unable to conceive your meaning vividly enough.
In any case it may want to make a noise more than to spare your feelings.
You may therefore have to explain that the effect of the irritation
will be that you will do something unpleasant if the noise continues.
The something unpleasant may be only a look of suffering to rouse
the child's affectionate sympathy (if it has any), or it may run to
forcible expulsion from the room with plenty of unnecessary violence;
but the principle is the same: there are no false pretences involved:
the child learns in a straightforward way that it does not pay to
be inconsiderate. Also, perhaps, that Mamma, who made the child learn
the Sermon on the Mount, is not really a Christian.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright The Sin of Nadab and Abihu}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{The Sin of Nadab and Abihu}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{The Sin of Nadab and
Abihu}

But there is another sort of answer in wide use which is neither straightforward,
instructive, nor harmless. In its simplest form it substitutes for
{}``Stop that noise,'' {}``\textit{Dont} be naughty,'' which means
that the child, instead of annoying you by a perfectly healthy and
natural infantile procedure, is offending God. This is a blasphemous
lie; and the fact that it is on the lips of every nurserymaid does
not excuse it in the least. Dickens tells us of a nurserymaid who
elaborated it into {}``If you do that, angels wont never love you.''
I remember a servant who used to tell me that if I were not good,
by which she meant if I did not behave with a single eye to her personal
convenience, the cock would come down the chimney. Less imaginative
but equally dishonest people told me I should go to hell if I did
not make myself agreeable to them. Bodily violence, provided it be
the hasty expression of normal provoked resentment and not vicious
cruelty, cannot harm a child as this sort of pious fraud harms it.
There is a legal limit to physical cruelty; and there are also human
limits to it. There is an active Society which brings to book a good
many parents who starve and torture and overwork their children, and
intimidates a good many more. When parents of this type are caught,
they are treated as criminals; and not infrequently the police have
some trouble to save them from being lynched. The people against whom
children are wholly unprotected are those who devote themselves to
the very mischievous and cruel sort of abortion which is called bringing
up a child in the way it should go. Now nobody knows the way a child
should go. All the ways discovered so far lead to the horrors of our
existing civilizations, described quite justifiably by Ruskin as heaps
of agonizing human maggots, struggling with one another for scraps
of food. Pious fraud is an attempt to pervert that precious and sacred
thing the child's conscience into an instrument of our own convenience,
and to use that wonderful and terrible power called Shame to grind
our own axe. It is the sin of stealing fire from the altar: a sin
so impudently practised by popes, parents, and \textit{p\'{e}dagogues},
that one can hardly expect the nurserymaids to see any harm in stealing
a few cinders when they are worrited.

Into the blackest depths of this violation of children's souls one
can hardly bear to look; for here we find pious fraud masking the
violation of the body by obscene cruelty. Any parent or school teacher
who takes a secret and abominable delight in torture is allowed to
lay traps into which every child must fall, and then beat it to his
or her heart's content. A gentleman once wrote to me and said, with
an obvious conviction that he was being most reasonable and high minded,
that the only thing he beat his children for was failure in perfect
obedience and perfect truthfulness. On these attributes, he said,
he must insist. As one of them is not a virtue at all, and the other
is the attribute of a god, one can imagine what the lives of this
gentleman's children would have been if it had been possible for him
to live down to his monstrous and foolish pretensions. And yet he
might have written his letter to The Times (he very nearly did, by
the way) without incurring any danger of being removed to an asylum,
or even losing his reputation for taking a very proper view of his
parental duties. And at least it was not a trivial view, nor an ill
meant one. It was much more respectable than the general consensus
of opinion that if a school teacher can devise a question a child
cannot answer, or overhear it calling omega omeega, he or she may
beat the child viciously. Only, the cruelty must be whitewashed by
a moral excuse, and a pretence of reluctance. It must be for the child's
good. The assailant must say {}``This hurts me more than it hurts
you.'' There must be hypocrisy as well as cruelty. The injury to
the child would be far less if the voluptuary said frankly {}``I
beat you because I like beating you; and I shall do it whenever I
can contrive an excuse for it.'' But to represent this detestable
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 to add to
the torture of the body, out of which the flogger at least gets some
pleasure, the maiming and blinding of the child's soul, which can
bring nothing but horror to anyone.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright The Manufacture of Monsters}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{The Manufacture of Monsters}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{The Manufacture of Monsters}

This industry is by no means peculiar to China. The Chinese (they
say) make physical monsters. We revile them for it and proceed to
make moral monsters of our own children. The most excusable parents
are those who try to correct their own faults in their offspring.
The parent who says to his child: {}``I am one of the successes of
the Almighty: therefore imitate me in every particular or I will have
the skin off your back'' (a quite common attitude) is a much more
absurd figure than the man who, with a pipe in his mouth, thrashes
his boy for smoking. If you must hold yourself up to your children
as an object lesson (which is not at all necessary), hold yourself
up as a warning and not as an example. But you had much better let
the child's character alone. If you once allow yourself to regard
a child as so much material for you to manufacture into any shape
that happens to suit your fancy you are defeating the experiment of
the Life Force. You are assuming that the child does not know its
own business, and that you do. In this you are sure to be wrong: the
child feels the drive of the Life Force (often called the Will of
God); and you cannot feel it for him. Handel's parents no doubt thought
they knew better than their child when they tried to prevent his becoming
a musician. They would have been equally wrong and equally unsuccessful
if they had tried to prevent the child becoming a great rascal had
its genius lain in that direction. Handel would have been Handel,
and Napoleon and Peter of Russia \textit{them}selves in spite of all
the parents in creation, because, as often happens, they were stronger
than their parents. But this does not happen always. Most children
can be, and many are, hopelessly warped and wasted by parents who
are ignorant and silly enough to suppose that they know what a human
being ought to be, and who stick at nothing in their determination
to force their children into their moulds. Every child has a right
to its own bent. It has a right to be a Plymouth Brother though its
parents be convinced atheists. It has a right to dislike its mother
or father or sister or brother or uncle or aunt if they are antipathetic
to it. It has a right to find its own way and go its own way, whether
that way seems wise or foolish to others, exactly as an adult has.
It has a right to privacy as to its own doings and its own affairs
as much as if it were its own father.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Small and Large Families}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Small and Large Families}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Small and Large Families}

These rights have now become more important than they used to be,
because the modern practice of limiting families enables them to be
more effectually violated. In a family of ten, eight, six, or even
four children, the rights of the younger ones to a great extent take
care of themselves and of the rights of the elder ones too. Two adult
parents, in spite of a house to keep and an income to earn, can still
interfere to a disastrous extent with the rights and liberties of
one child. But by the time a fourth child has arrived, they are not
only outnumbered two to one, but are getting tired of the thankless
and mischievous job of bringing up their children in the way they
think they should go. The old observation that members of large families
get on in the world holds good because in large families it is impossible
for each child to receive what schoolmasters call {}``individual
attention.'' The children may receive a good deal of individual attention
from one another in the shape of outspoken reproach, ruthless ridicule,
and violent resistance to their attempts at aggression; but the parental
despots are compelled by the multitude of their subjects to resort
to political rather than personal rule, and to spread their attempts
at moral monster-making over so many children, that each child has
enough freedom, and enough sport in the prophylactic process of laughing
at its elders behind their backs, to escape with much less damage
than the single child. In a large school the system may be bad; but
the personal influence of the head master has to be exerted, when
it is exerted at all, in a public way, because he has little more
power of working on the affections of the individual scholar in the
intimate way that, for example, the mother of a single child can,
than the prime minister has of working on the affections of any individual
voter.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Children as Nuisances}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Children as Nuisances}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Children as Nuisances}

Experienced parents, when children's rights are preached to them,
very naturally ask whether children are to be allowed to do what they
like. The best reply is to ask whether adults are to be allowed to
do what they like. The two cases are the same. The adult who is nasty
is not allowed to do what he likes: neither can the child who likes
to be nasty. There is no difference in principle between the rights
of a child and those of an adult: the difference in their cases is
one of circumstance. An adult is not supposed to be punished except
by process of law; nor, when he is so punished, is the person whom
he has injured allowed to act as judge, jury, and executioner. It
is true that employers do act in this way every day to their workpeople;
but this is not a justified and intended part of the situation: it
is an abuse of Capitalism which nobody defends in principle. As between
child and parent or nurse it is not argued about because it is inevitable.
You cannot hold an impartial judicial inquiry every time a child misbehaves
itself. To allow the child to misbehave without instantly making it
unpleasantly conscious of the fact would be to spoil it. The adult
has therefore to take action of some sort with nothing but his conscience
to shield the child from injustice or unkindness. The action may be
a torrent of scolding culminating in a furious smack causing terror
and pain, or it may be a remonstrance causing remorse, or it may be
a sarcasm causing shame and humiliation, or it may be a sermon causing
the child to believe that it is a little reprobate on the road to
hell. The child has no defence in any case except the kindness and
conscience of the adult; and the adult had better not forget this;
for it involves a heavy responsibility.

And now comes our difficulty. The responsibility, being so heavy,
cannot be discharged by persons of feeble character or intelligence.
And yet people of high character and intelligence cannot 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
persistence in asking questions. If the child is to remain in the
room with a highly intelligent and sensitive adult, it must be told,
and if necessary forced, to sit still and not speak, which is injurious
to its health, unnatural, unjust, and therefore cruel and selfish
beyond toleration. Consequently the highly intelligent and sensitive
adult hands the child over to a nurserymaid who has no nerves and
can therefore stand more noise, but who has also no scruples, and
may therefore be very bad company for the child.

Here we have come to the central fact of the question: a fact nobody
avows, which is yet the true explanation of the monstrous system of
child imprisonment and torture which we disguise under such hypocrisies
as education, training, formation of character and the rest of it.
This fact is simply that a child is a nuisance to a grown-up person.
What is more, the nuisance becomes more and more intolerable as the
grown-up person becomes more cultivated, more sensitive, and more
deeply engaged in the highest methods of adult work. The child at
play is noisy and ought to be noisy: Sir Isaac Newton at work is quiet
and ought to be quiet. And the child should spend most of its time
at play, whilst the adult should spend most of his time at work. I
am not now writing on behalf of persons who coddle themselves into
a ridiculous condition of nervous feebleness, and at last imagine
themselves unable to work under conditions of bustle which to healthy
people are cheerful and stimulating. I am sure that if people had
to choose between living where the noise of children never stopped
and where it was never heard, all the goodnatured and sound people
would prefer the incessant noise to the incessant silence. But that
choice is not thrust upon us by the nature of things. There is no
reason why children and adults should not see just as much of one
another as is good for them, no more and no less. Even at present
you are not compelled to choose between sending your child to a boarding
school (which means getting rid of it altogether on more or less hypocritical
pretences) and keeping it continually at home. Most working folk today
either send their children to day schools or turn them out of doors.
This solves the problem for the parents. It does not solve it for
the children, any more than the tethering of a goat in a field or
the chasing of an unlicensed dog into the streets solves it for the
goat or the dog; but it shews that in no class are people willing
to endure the society of their children, and consequently that it
is an error to believe that the family provides children with edifying
adult society, or that the family is a social unit. The family is
in that, as in so many other respects, a humbug. Old people and young
people cannot walk at the same pace without distress and final loss
of health to one of the parties. When they are sitting indoors they
cannot endure the same degrees of temperature and the same supplies
of fresh air. Even if the main factors of noise, restlessness, and
inquisitiveness are left out of account, children can stand with indifference
sights, sounds, smells, and disorders that would make an adult of
fifty utterly miserable; whilst on the other hand such adults find
a tranquil happiness in conditions which to children mean unspeakable
boredom. And since our system is nevertheless to pack them all into
the same house and pretend that they are happy, and that this particular
sort of happiness is the foundation of virtue, it is found that in
discussing family life we never speak of actual adults or actual children,
or of realities of any sort, but always of ideals such as The Home,
a Mother's Influence, a Father's Care, Filial Piety, Duty, Affection,
Family Life, \textit{etc}.\ \textit{etc}., which are no doubt very
comforting phrases, but which beg the question of what a home and
a mother's influence and a father's care and so forth really come
to in practice. How many hours a week of the time when his children
are out of bed does the ordinary bread-winning father spend in the
company of his children or even in the same building with them? The
home may be a thieves' kitchen, the mother a procuress, the father
a violent drunkard; or the mother and father may be fashionable people
who see their children three or four times a year during the holidays,
and then not oftener than they can help, living meanwhile in daily
and intimate contact with their valets and lady's-maids, whose influence
and care are often dominant in the household. Affection, as distinguished
from simple kindliness, may or may not exist: when it does it either
depends on qualities in the parties that would produce it equally
if they were of no kin to one another, or it is a more or less morbid
survival of the nursing passion; for affection between adults (if
they are really adult in mind and not merely grown-up children) and
creatures so relatively selfish and cruel as children necessarily
are without knowing it or meaning it, cannot be called natural: in
fact the evidence shews that it is easier to love the company of a
dog than of a commonplace child between the ages of six and the beginnings
of controlled maturity; for women who cannot bear to be separated
from their pet dogs send their children to boarding schools cheerfully.
They may say and even believe that in allowing their children to leave
home they are sacrificing themselves for their children's good; but
there are very few pet dogs who would not be the better for a month
or two spent elsewhere than in a lady's lap or roasting on a drawingroom
hearthrug. Besides, to allege that children are better continually
away from home is to give up the whole popular sentimental theory
of the family; yet the dogs are kept and the children are banished.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Child Fanciers}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Child Fanciers}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Child Fanciers}

There is, however, a good deal of spurious family affection. There
is the clannishness that will make a dozen brothers and sisters who
quarrel furiously among themselves close up their ranks and make common
cause against a brother-in-law or a sister-in-law. And there is a
strong sense of property in children, which often makes mothers and
fathers bitterly jealous of allowing anyone else to interfere with
their children, whom they may none the less treat very badly. And
there is an extremely dangerous craze for children which leads certain
people to establish orphanages and baby farms and schools, seizing
any pretext for filling their houses with children exactly as some
eccentric old ladies and gentlemen fill theirs with cats. In such
places the children are the victims of all the \textit{\emph{caprices}}
of doting affection and all the excesses of lascivious cruelty. Yet
the people who have this morbid craze seldom have any difficulty in
finding victims. Parents and guardians are so worried by children
and so anxious to get rid of them that anyone who is willing to take
them off their hands is welcomed and whitewashed. The very people
who read with indignation of Squeers and Creakle in the novels of
Dickens are quite ready to hand over their own children to Squeers
and Creakle, and to pretend that Squeers and Creakle are monsters
of the past. But read the autobiography of Stanley the traveller,
or sit in the company of men talking about their school-days, and
you will soon find that fiction, which must, if it is to be sold and
read, stop short of being positively sickening, dare not tell the
whole truth about the people to whom children are handed over on educational
pretexts. Not very long ago a schoolmaster in Ireland was murdered
by his boys; and for reasons which were never made public it was at
first decided not to prosecute the murderers. Yet all these flogging
schoolmasters and orphanage fiends and baby farmers are {}``lovers
of children.'' They are really child fanciers (like bird fanciers
or dog fanciers) by irresistible natural predilection, never happy
unless they are surrounded by their victims, and always certain to
make their living by accepting the custody of children, no matter
how many alternative occupations may be available. And bear in mind
that they are only the extreme instances of what is commonly called
natural affection, apparently because it is obviously unnatural.

The really natural feeling of adults for children in the long prosaic
intervals between the moments of affectionate impulse is just that
feeling that leads them to avoid their care and constant company as
a burden beyond bearing, and to pretend that the places they send
them to are well conducted, beneficial, and indispensable to the success
of the children in after life. The true cry of the kind mother after
her little rosary of kisses is {}``Run away, darling.'' It is nicer
than {}``Hold your noise, you young 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 live in one another's company either
the adult or the child will be miserable. There is nothing whatever
unnatural or wrong or shocking in this fact; and there is no harm
in it if only it be sensibly faced and provided for. The mischief
that it does at present is produced by our efforts to ignore it, or
to smother it under a heap of sentimental lies and false pretences.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Childhood as a State of Sin}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Childhood as a State of Sin}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Childhood as a State
of Sin}

Unfortunately all this nonsense tends to accumulate as we become more
sympathetic. In many families it is still the custom to treat childhood
frankly as a state of sin, and impudently proclaim the monstrous principle
that little children should be seen and not heard, and to enforce
a set of prison rules designed solely to make cohabitation with children
as convenient as possible for adults without the smallest regard for
the interests, either remote or immediate, of the children. This system
tends to produce a tough, rather brutal, stupid, unscrupulous class,
with a fixed idea that all enjoyment consists in undetected sinning;
and in certain phases of civilization people of this kind are apt
to get the upper hand of more amiable and conscientious races and
classes. They have the ferocity of a chained dog, and are proud of
it. But the end of it is that they are always in chains, even at the
height of their military or political success: they win everything
on condition that they are afraid to enjoy it. Their civilizations
rest on intimidation, which is so necessary to them that when they
cannot find anybody brave enough to intimidate them they intimidate
themselves and live in a continual moral and political panic. In the
end they get found out and bullied. But that is not the point that
concerns us here, which is, that they are in some respects better
brought up than the children of sentimental people who are always
anxious and miserable about their duty to their children, and who
end by neither making their children happy nor having a tolerable
life for themselves. A selfish tyrant you know where to have, and
he (or she) at least does not confuse your affections; but a conscientious
and kindly meddler may literally worry you out of your senses. It
is fortunate that only very few parents are capable of doing what
they conceive their duty continuously or even at all, and that still
fewer are tough enough to ride roughshod over their children at home.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright School}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{School}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{School}

But please observe the limitation {}``at home.'' What private amateur
parental enterprise cannot do may be done very effectively by organized
professional enterprise in large institutions established for the
purpose. And it is to such professional enterprise that parents hand
over their children when they can afford it. They send their children
to school; and there is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for
innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison.
But it is in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison,
for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders
and the governor (who of course would not be warders and governors
if they could write readable books), and beaten or otherwise tormented
if you cannot remember their utterly unmemorable contents. In the
prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing
without charm or interest on subjects that they \textit{dont} understand
and \textit{dont} care about, and are therefore incapable of making
you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body;
but they do not torture your brains; and they protect you against
violence and outrage from your fellow prisoners. In a school you have
none of these advantages. With the world's bookshelves loaded with
fascinating and inspired books, the very manna sent down from Heaven
to feed your souls, you are forced to read a hideous imposture called
a school book, written by a man who cannot write: a book from which
no human being can learn anything: a book which, though you may decipher
it, you cannot in any fruitful sense read, though the enforced attempt
will make you loathe the sight of a book all the rest of your life.
With millions of acres of woods and valleys and hills and wind and
air and birds and streams and fishes and all sorts of instructive
and healthy things easily accessible, or with streets and shop windows
and crowds and vehicles and all sorts of city delights at the door,
you are forced to sit, not in a room with some human grace and comfort
or furniture and decoration, but in a stalled pound with a lot of
other children, beaten if you talk, beaten if you move, beaten if
you cannot prove by answering idiotic questions that even when you
escaped from the pound and from the eye of your gaoler, you were still
agonizing over his detestable sham books instead of daring to live.
And your childish hatred of your gaoler and flogger is nothing to
his adult hatred of you; for he is a slave forced to endure your society
for his daily bread. You have not even the satisfaction of knowing
how you are torturing him and how he loathes you; and you give yourself
unnecessary pains to annoy him with furtive tricks and spiteful doing
of forbidden things. No wonder he is sometimes provoked to fiendish
outbursts of wrath. No wonder men of downright sense, like Dr Johnson,
admit that under such circumstances children will not learn anything
unless they are so cruelly beaten that they make desperate efforts
to memorize words and phrases to escape flagellation. It is a ghastly
business, quite beyond words, this schooling.

And now I hear cries of protest arising all round. First my own schoolmasters,
or their ghosts, asking whether I was cruelly beaten at school? No;
but then I did not learn anything at school. Dr Johnson's schoolmaster
presumably did care enough whether Sam learned anything to beat him
savagely enough to force him to lame his mind---for Johnson's great
mind \emph{was} lamed---by learning his lessons. None of my schoolmasters
really cared a rap (or perhaps it would be fairer to them to say that
their employers did not care a rap and therefore did not give them
the necessary caning powers) whether I learnt my lessons or not, provided
my father paid my schooling bill, the collection of which was the
real object of the school. Consequently I did not learn my school
lessons, having much more important ones in hand, with the result
that I have not wasted my life trifling with literary fools in taverns
as Johnson did when he should have been shaking England with the thunder
of his spirit. My schooling did me a great deal of harm and no good
whatever: it was simply dragging a child's soul through the dirt;
but I escaped Squeers and Creakle just as I escaped Johnson and Carlyle.
And this is what happens to most of us. We are not effectively coerced
to learn: we stave off punishment as far as we can by lying and trickery
and guessing and using our wits; and when this does not suffice we
scribble impositions, or suffer extra imprisonments---{}``keeping
in'' was the phrase in my time---or let a master strike us with a
cane and fall back on our pride at being able to hear it physically
(he not being allowed to hit us too hard) to outface the dishonor
we should have been taught to die rather than endure. And so idleness
and worthlessness on the one hand and a pretence of coercion on the
other became a despicable routine. If my schoolmasters had been really
engaged in educating me instead of painfully earning their bread by
keeping me from annoying my elders they would have turned me out of
the school, telling me that I was thoroughly disloyal to it; that
I had no intention of learning; that I was mocking and distracting
the boys who did wish to learn; that I was a liar and a shirker and
a seditious little nuisance; and that nothing could injure me in character
and degrade their occupation more than allowing me (much less forcing
me) to remain in the school under such conditions. But in order to
get expelled, it was necessary commit a crime of such atrocity that
the parents of other boys would have threatened to remove their sons
sooner than allow them to be schoolfellows with the delinquent. I
can remember only one case in which such a penalty was threatened;
and in that case the culprit, a boarder, had kissed a housemaid, or
possibly, being a handsome youth, been kissed by her. She did not
kiss me; and nobody ever dreamt of expelling me. The truth was, a
boy meant just so much a year to the institution. That was why he
was kept there against his will. That was why he was kept there when
his expulsion would have been an unspeakable relief and benefit both
to his teachers and himself.

It may be argued that if the uncommercial attitude had been taken,
and all the disloyal wasters and idlers shewn sternly to the door,
the school would not have been emptied, but filled. But so honest
an attitude was impossible. The masters must have hated the school
much more than the boys did. Just as you cannot imprison a man without
imprisoning a warder to see that he does not escape, the warder being
tied to the prison as effectually by the fear of unemployment and
starvation as the prisoner is by the bolts and bars, so these poor
schoolmasters, with their small salaries and large classes, were as
much prisoners as we were, and much more responsible and anxious ones.
They could not impose the heroic attitude on their employers; nor
would they have been able to obtain places as schoolmasters if their
habits had been heroic. For the best of them their employment was
provisional: they looked forward to escaping from it into the pulpit.
The ablest and most impatient of them were often so irritated by the
awkward, slow-witted, slovenly boys: that is, the ones that required
special consideration and patient treatment, that they vented their
irritation on them ruthlessly, nothing being easier than to entrap
or bewilder such a boy into giving a pretext for punishing him.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright My Scholastic Acquirements}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{My Scholastic Acquirements}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{My Scholastic Acquirements}

The results, as far as I was concerned, were what might have been
expected. My school made only the thinnest pretence of teaching anything
but Latin and Greek. When I went there as a very small boy I knew
a good deal of Latin grammar which I had been taught in a few weeks
privately by my uncle. When I had been several years at school this
same uncle examined me and discovered that the net result of my schooling
was that I had forgotten what he had taught me, and had learnt nothing
else. To this day, though I can still decline a Latin noun and repeat
some of the old paradigms in the old meaningless way, because their
rhythm sticks to me, I have never yet seen a Latin inscription on
a tomb that I could translate throughout. Of Greek I can decipher
perhaps the greater part of the Greek alphabet. In short, I am, as
to classical education, another Shakespear. I can read French as easily
as English; and under pressure of necessity I can turn to account
some scraps of German and a little operatic Italian; but these I was
never taught at school. Instead, I was taught lying, dishonorable
submission to tyranny, dirty stories, a blasphemous habit of treating
love and maternity as obscene jokes, hopelessness, evasion, derision,
cowardice, and all the blackguard's shifts by which the coward intimidates
other cowards. And if I had been a boarder at an English public school
instead of a day boy at an Irish one, I might have had to add to these,
deeper shames still.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Schoolmasters of Genius}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Schoolmasters of Genius}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Schoolmasters of Genius}

And now, if I have reduced the ghosts of my schoolmasters to melancholy
acquiescence in all this (which everybody who has been at an ordinary
school will recognize as true), I have still to meet the much more
sincere protests of the handful of people who have a natural genius
for {}``bringing up'' children. I shall be asked with kindly scorn
whether I have heard of Froebel and Pestalozzi, whether I know the
work that is being done by Miss Mason and the \textit{Dottoressa}
Montessori or, best of all as I think, the Eurythmics School of Jacques
Dalcroze at Hellerau near Dresden. Jacques Dalcroze, like Plato, believes
in saturating his pupils with music. They walk to music, play to music,
work to music, obey drill commands that would bewilder a guardsman
to music, think to music, live to music, get so clearheaded about
music that they can move their several limbs each in a different metre
until they become complicated living magazines of cross rhythms, and,
what is more, make music for others to do all these things to. Stranger
still, though Jacques Dalcroze, like all these great teachers, is
the completest of tyrants, knowing what is right and that he must
and will have the lesson just so or else break his heart (not somebody
else's, observe), yet his school is so fascinating that every woman
who sees it exclaims {}``Oh, why was I not taught like this!'' and
elderly gentlemen excitedly enrol themselves as students and distract
classes of infants by their desperate endeavors to beat two in a bar
with one hand and three with the other, and start off on earnest walks
round the room, taking two steps backward whenever Monsieur Daleroze
calls out {}``Hop!'' Oh yes: I know all about these wonderful schools
that you cannot keep children or even adults out of, and these teachers
whom their pupils not only obey without coercion, but adore. And if
you will tell me roughly how many Masons and Montessoris and Dalcrozes
you think you can pick up in Europe for salaries of from thirty shillings
to five pounds a week, I will estimate your chances of converting
your millions of little scholastic hells into little scholastic heavens.
If you are a distressed gentlewoman starting to make a living, you
can still open a little school; and you can easily buy a secondhand
brass plate inscribed PESTALOZZIAN INSTITUTE and nail it to your door,
though you have no more idea of who Pestalozzi was and what he advocated
or how he did it than the manager of a hotel which began as a Hydropathic
has of the water cure. Or you can buy a cheaper plate inscribed KINDERGARTEN,
and imagine, or leave others to imagine, that Froebel is the governing
genius of your little \textit{creche}. No doubt the new brass plates
are being inscribed Montessori Institute, and will be used when the
Dotteressa is no longer with us by all the Mrs Pipchins and Mrs Wilfers
throughout this unhappy land.

I will go further, and admit that the brass plates may not all be
frauds. I will tell you that one of my friends was led to genuine
love and considerable knowledge of classical literature by an Irish
schoolmaster whom you would call a hedge schoolmaster (he would not
be allowed to teach anything now) and that it took four years of Harrow
to obliterate that knowledge and change the love into loathing. Another
friend of mine who keeps a school in the suburbs, and who deeply deplores
my {}``prejudice against schoolmasters,'' has offered to accept
my challenge to tell his pupils that they are as free to get up and
go out of the school at any moment as their parents are to get up
and go out of a theatre where my plays are being performed. Even among
my own schoolmasters I can recollect a few whose classes interested
me, and whom I should certainly have pestered for information and
instruction if I could have got into any decent human relationship
with them, and if they had not been compelled by their position to
defend themselves as carefully against such advances as against furtive
attempts to hurt them accidentally in the football field or smash
their hats with a clod from behind a wall. But these rare cases actually
do more harm than good; for they encourage us to pretend that all
schoolmasters are like that. Of what use is it to us that there are
always somewhere two or three teachers of children whose specific
genius for their occupation triumphs over our tyrannous system and
even finds in it its opportunity? For that matter, it is possible,
if difficult, to find a solicitor, or even a judge, who has some notion
of what law means, a doctor with a glimmering of science, an officer
who understands duty and discipline, and a clergyman with an inkling
of religion, though there are nothing like enough of them to go round.
But even the few who, like Ibsen's Mrs Solness, have {}``a genius
for nursing the souls of little children'' are like angels forced
to work in prisons instead of in heaven; and even at that they are
mostly underpaid and despised. That friend of mine who went from the
hedge schoolmaster to Harrow once saw a schoolmaster rush from an
elementary school in pursuit of a boy and strike him. My friend, not
considering that the unfortunate man was probably goaded beyond endurance,
smote the schoolmaster and blackened his eye. The schoolmaster appealed
to the law; and my friend found himself waiting nervously in the Hammersmith
Police Court to answer for his breach of the peace. In his anxiety
he asked a police officer what would happen to him. {}``What did
you do?'' said the officer. {}``I gave a man a black eye'' said
my friend. {}``Six pounds if he was a gentleman: two pounds if he
wasnt,'' said the constable. {}``He was a schoolmaster'' said my
friend. {}``Two pounds'' said the officer; and two pounds it was.
The blood money was paid cheerfully; and I have ever since advised
elementary schoolmasters to qualify themselves in the art of self-defence,
as the British Constitution expresses our national estimate of them
by allowing us to blacken three of their eyes for the same price as
one of an ordinary professional man. How many Froebels and Pestalozzis
and Miss Masons and Doctoress Montessoris would you be likely to get
on these terms even if they occurred much more frequently in nature
than they actually do?

No: I cannot be put off by the news that our system would be perfect
if it were worked by angels. I do not admit it even at that, just
as I do not admit that if the sky fell we should all catch larks.
But I do not propose to bother about a supply of specific genius which
does not exist, and which, if it did exist, could operate only by
at once recognizing and establishing the rights of children.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright What We Do Not Teach, and Why}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{What We Do Not Teach, and Why}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{What We Do Not Teach,
and Why}

To my mind, a glance at the subjects now taught in schools ought to
convince any reasonable person that the object of the lessons is to
keep children out of mischief, and not to qualify them for their part
in life as responsible citizens of a free State. It is not possible
to maintain freedom in any State, no matter how perfect its original
constitution, unless its publicly active citizens know a good deal
of constitutional history, law, and political science, with its basis
of economics. If as much pains had been taken a century ago to make
us all understand Ricardo's law of rent as to learn our catechisms,
the face of the world would have been changed for the better. But
for that very reason the greatest care is taken to keep such beneficially
subversive knowledge from us, with the result that in public life
we are either place-hunters, anarchists, or sheep shepherded by wolves.

But it will be observed that these are highly controversial subjects.
Now no controversial subject can be taught dogmatically. He who knows
only the official side of a controversy knows less than nothing of
its nature. The abler a schoolmaster is, the more dangerous he is
to his pupils unless they have the fullest opportunity of hearing
another equally able person do his utmost to shake his authority and
convict him of error.

At present such teaching is very unpopular. It does not exist in schools;
but every adult who derives his knowledge of public affairs from the
newspapers can take in, at the cost of an extra halfpenny, two papers
of opposite politics. Yet the ordinary man so dislikes having his
mind unsettled, as he calls it, that he angrily refuses to allow a
paper which dissents from his views to be brought into his house.
Even at his club he resents seeing it, and excludes it if it happens
to run counter to the opinions of all the members. The result is that
his opinions are not worth considering. A churchman who never reads
The Freethinker very soon has no more real religion than the atheist
who never reads The Church Times. The attitude is the same in both
cases: they want to hear nothing good of their enemies; consequently
they remain enemies and suffer from bad blood all their lives; whereas
men who know their opponents and understand their case, quite commonly
respect and like them, and always learn something from them.

Here, again, as at so many points, we come up against the abuse of
schools to keep people in ignorance and error, so that they may be
incapable of successful revolt against their industrial slavery. The
most important simple fundamental economic truth to impress on a child
in complicated civilizations like ours is the truth that whoever consumes
goods or services without producing by personal effort the equivalent
of what he or she consumes, inflicts on the community precisely the
same injury that a thief produces, and would, in any honest State,
be treated as a thief, however full his or her pockets might be of
money made by other people. The nation that first teaches its children
that truth, instead of flogging them if they discover it for themselves,
may have to fight all the slaves of all the other nations to begin
with; but it will beat them as easily as an unburdened man with his
hands free and with all his energies in full play can beat an invalid
who has to carry another invalid on his back.

This, however, is not an evil produced by the denial of children's
rights, nor is it inherent in the nature of schools. I mention it
only because it would be folly to call for a reform of our schools
without taking account of the corrupt resistance which awaits the
reformer.

A word must also be said about the opposition to reform of the vested
interest of the classical and coercive schoolmaster. He, poor wretch,
has no other means of livelihood; and reform would leave him as a
workman is now left when he is superseded by a machine. He had therefore
better do what he can to get the workman compensated, so as to make
the public familiar with the idea of compensation before his own turn
comes.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Taboo in Schools}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Taboo in Schools}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Taboo in Schools}

The suppression of economic knowledge, disastrous as it is, is quite
intelligible, its corrupt motive being as clear as the motive of a
burglar for concealing his jemmy from a policeman. But the other great
suppression in our schools, the suppression of the subject of sex,
is a case of taboo. In mankind, the lower the type, and the less cultivated
the mind, the less courage there is to face important subjects objectively.
The ablest and most highly cultivated people continually discuss religion,
politics, and sex: it is hardly an exaggeration to say that they discuss
nothing else with fully-awakened interest. Commoner and less cultivated
people, even when they form societies for discussion, make a rule
that politics and religion are not to be mentioned, and take it for
granted that no decent person would attempt to discuss sex. The three
subjects are feared because they rouse the crude passions which call
for furious gratification in murder and rapine at worst, and, at best,
lead to quarrels and undesirable states of consciousness.

Even when this excuse of bad manners, ill temper, and brutishness
(for that is what it comes to) compels us to accept it from those
adults among whom political and theological discussion does as a matter
of fact lead to the drawing of knives and pistols, and sex discussion
leads to obscenity, it has no application to children except as an
imperative reason for training them to respect other people's opinions,
and to insist on respect for their own in these as in other important
matters which are equally dangerous: for example, money. And in any
case there are decisive reasons; superior, like the reasons for suspending
conventional \textit{\emph{reticences}} between doctor and patient,
to all considerations of mere decorum, for giving proper instruction
in the facts of sex. Those who object to it (not counting coarse people
who thoughtlessly seize every opportunity of affecting and parading
a fictitious delicacy) are, in effect, advocating ignorance as a safeguard
against precocity. If ignorance were practicable there would be something
to be said for it up to the age at which ignorance is a danger instead
of a safeguard. Even as it is, it seems undesirable that any special
emphasis should be given to the subject, whether by way of delicacy
and poetry or too impressive warning. But the plain fact is that in
refusing to allow the child to be taught by qualified unrelated elders
(the parents shrink from the lesson, even when they are otherwise
qualified, because their own relation to the child makes the subject
impossible between them) we are virtually arranging to have our children
taught by other children in guilty secrets and unclean jests. And
that settles the question for all sensible people.

The dogmatic objection, the sheer instinctive taboo which rules the
subject out altogether as indecent, has no age limit. It means that
at no matter what age a woman consents to a proposal of marriage,
she should do so in ignorance of the relation she is undertaking.
When this actually happens (and apparently it does happen oftener
than would seem possible) a horrible fraud is being practiced on both
the man and the woman. He is led to believe that she knows what she
is promising, and that he is in no danger of finding himself bound
to a woman to whom he is eugenically antipathetic. She contemplates
nothing but such affectionate relations as may exist between her and
her nearest kinsmen, and has no knowledge of the condition which,
if not foreseen, must come as an amazing revelation and a dangerous
shock, ending possibly in the discovery that the marriage has been
an irreparable mistake. Nothing can justify such a risk. There may
be people incapable of understanding that the right to know all there
is to know about oneself is a natural human right that sweeps away
all the pretences of others to tamper with ones consciousness in order
to produce what they choose to consider a good character. But they
must here bow to the plain mischievousness of entrapping people into
contracts on which the happiness of their whole lives depends without
letting them know what they are undertaking.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Alleged Novelties in Modern Schools}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Alleged Novelties in Modern Schools}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Alleged Novelties in
Modern Schools}

There is just one more nuisance to be disposed of before I come to
the positive side of my case. I mean the person who tells me that
my schooldays belong to a bygone order of educational ideas and institutions,
and that schools are not now a bit like my old school. I reply, with
Sir Walter Raleigh, by calling on my soul to give this statement the
lie. Some years ago I lectured in Oxford on the subject of Education.
A friend to whom I mentioned my intention said, {}``You know nothing
of modern education: schools are not now what they were when you were
a boy.'' I immediately procured the time sheets of half a dozen modern
schools, and found, as I expected, that they might all have been my
old school: there was no real difference. I may mention, too, that
I have visited modern schools, and observed that there is a tendency
to hang printed pictures in an untidy and soulless manner on the walls,
and occasionally to display on the mantel-shelf a deplorable glass
case containing certain objects which might possibly, if placed in
the hands of the pupils, give them some practical experience of the
weight of a pound and the length of an inch. And sometimes a scoundrel
who has rifled a bird's nest or killed a harmless snake encourages
the children to go and do likewise by putting his victims into an
imitation nest and bottle and exhibiting them as aids to {}``Nature
study.'' A suggestion that Nature is worth study would certainly
have staggered my schoolmasters; so perhaps I may admit a gleam of
progress here. But as any child who attempted to handle these dusty
objects would probably be caned, I do not attach any importance to
such modernities in school furniture. The school remains what it was
in my boyhood, because its real object remains what it was. And that
object, I repeat, is to keep the children out of mischief: mischief
meaning for the most part worrying the grown-ups.

What is to be Done?

The practical question, then, is what to do with the children. Tolerate
them at home we will not. Let them run loose in the streets we dare
not until our streets become safe places for children, which, to our
utter shame, they are not at present, though they can hardly be worse
than some homes and some schools.

The grotesque difficulty of making even a beginning was brought home
to me in the little village in Hertfordshire where I write these lines
by the lady of the manor, who asked me very properly what I was going
to do for the village school. I did not know what to reply. As the
school kept the children quiet during my working hours, I did not
for the sake of my own personal convenmence want to blow it up with
dynamite as I should like to blow up most schools. So I asked for
guidance. {}``You ought to give a prize,'' said the lady. I asked
if there was a prize for good conduct. As I expected, there was: one
for the best-behaved boy and another for the best-behaved girl. On
reflection I offered a handsome prize for the worst-behaved boy and
girl on condition that a record should be kept of their subsequent
careers and compared with the records of the best-behaved, in order
to ascertain whether the school criterion of good conduct was valid
out of school. My offer was refused because it would not have had
the effect of encouraging the children to give as little trouble as
possible, which is of course the real object of all conduct prizes
in schools.

I must not pretend, then, that I have a system ready to replace all
the other systems. Obstructing the way of the proper organization
of childhood, as of everything else, lies our ridiculous misdistribution
of the national income, with its accompanying class distinctions and
imposition of snobbery on children as a necessary part of their social
training. The result of our economic folly is that we are a nation
of undesirable acquaintances; and the first object of all our institutions
for children is segregation. If, for example, our children were set
free to roam and play about as they pleased, they would have to be
policed; and the first duty of the police in a State like ours would
be to see that every child wore a badge indicating its class in society,
and that every child seen speaking to another child with a lower-class
badge, or any child wearing a higher badge than that allotted to it
by, say, the College of Heralds, should immediately be skinned alive
with a birch rod. It might even be insisted that girls with high-class
badges should be attended by footmen, grooms, or even military escorts.
In short, there is hardly any limit to the follies with which our
Commercialism would infect any system that it would tolerate at all.
But something like a change of heart is still possible; and since
all the evils of snobbery and segregation are rampant in our schools
at present we may as well make the best as the worst of them.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Children's Rights and Duties}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Children's Rights and Duties}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Childrens Rights and
Duties}

Now let us ask what are a child's rights, and what are the rights
of society over the child. Its rights, being clearly those of any
other human being, are summed up in the right to live: that is, to
have all the conclusive arguments that prove that it would be better
dead, that it is a child of wrath, that the population is already
excessive, that the pains of life are greater than its pleasures,
that its sacrifice in a hospital or laboratory experiment might save
millions of lives, \textit{etc}.\ \textit{etc}.\ \textit{etc}., put
out of the question, and its existence accepted as necessary and sacred,
all theories to the contrary notwithstanding, whether by Calvin or
Schopenhauer or Pasteur or the nearest person with a taste for infanticide.
And this right to live includes, and in fact is, the right to be what
the child likes and can, to do what it likes and can, to make what
it likes and can, to think what it likes and can, to smash what it
dislikes and can, and generally to behave in an altogether unaccountable
manner within the limits imposed by the similar rights of its neighbors.
And the rights of society over it clearly extend to requiring it to
qualify itself to live in society 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 letters and
telegrams, purchase food and clothing and railway tickets for itself,
count money and give and take change, and, generally, know how many
beans made five. It must know some law, were it only a simple set
of commandments, some political economy, agriculture enough to shut
the gates of fields with cattle in them and not to trample on growing
crops, sanitation enough not to defile its haunts, and religion enough
to have some idea of why it is allowed its rights and why it must
respect the rights of others. And the rest of its education must consist
of anything else it can pick up; for beyond this society cannot go
with any certainty, and indeed can only go this far rather apologetically
and provisionally, as doing the best it can on very uncertain ground.

Should Children Earn their Living?

Now comes the question how far children should be asked to contribute
to the support of the community. In approaching it we must put aside
the considerations that now induce all humane and thoughtful political
students to agitate for the uncompromising abolition of child labor
under our capitalist system. It is not the least of the curses of
that system that it will bequeath to future generations a mass of
legislation to prevent capitalists from {}``using up nine generations
of men in one generation,'' as they began by doing until they were
restrained by law at the suggestion of Robert Owen, the founder of
English Socialism. Most of this legislation will become an insufferable
restraint upon freedom and variety of action when Capitalism goes
the way of Druidic human sacrifice (a much less slaughterous institution).
There is every reason why a child should not be allowed to work for
commercial profit or for the support of its parents at the expense
of its own future; but there is no reason whatever why a child should
not do some work for its own sake and that of the community if it
can be shewn that both it and the community will be the better for
it.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Children's Happiness}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Children's Happiness}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Childrens Happiness}

Also it is important to put the happiness of the children rather carefully
in its place, which is really not a front place. The unsympathetic,
selfish, hard people who regard happiness as a very exceptional indulgence
to which children are by no means entitled, though they may be allowed
a very little of it on their birthdays or at Christmas, are sometimes
better parents in effect than those who imagine that children are
as capable of happiness as adults. Adults habitually exaggerate their
own capacity in that direction grossly; yet most adults can stand
an allowance of happiness that would be quite thrown away on children.
The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether
you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation
means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person is neither happy
nor unhappy, but simply alive and active, which is pleasanter than
any happiness until you are tired of it. That is why it is necessary
to happiness that one should be tired. Music after dinner is pleasant:
music before breakfast is so unpleasant as to be clearly unnatural.
To people who are not overworked holidays are a nuisance. To people
who are, and who can afford them, they are a troublesome necessity.
A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright The Horror of the Perpetual Holiday}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{The Horror of the Perpetual Holiday}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{The Horror of the Perpetual
Holiday}

It will be said here that, on the contrary, heaven is always conceived
as a perpetual holiday, and that whoever is not born to an independent
income is striving for one or longing for one because it gives holidays
for life. To which I reply, first, that heaven, as conventionally
conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable,
that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though
plenty of people have described a day at the seaside; and that the
genuine popular verdict on it is expressed in the proverb {}``Heaven
for holiness and Hell for company.'' Second, I point out that the
wretched people who have independent incomes and no useful occupation,
do the most amazingly disagreeable and dangerous things to make themselves
tired and hungry in the evening. When they are not involved in what
they call sport, they are doing aimlessly what other people have to
be paid to do: driving horses and motor cars; trying on dresses and
walking up and down to shew them off; and acting as footmen and housemaids
to royal personages. The sole and obvious cause of the notion that
idleness is delightful and that heaven is a place where there is nothing
to be done, is our school system and our industrial system. The school
is a prison in which work is a punishment and a curse. In avowed prisons,
hard labor, the only alleviation of a prisoner's lot, is treated as
an aggravation of his punishment; and everything possible is done
to intensify the prisoner's inculcated and unnatural notion that work
is an evil. In industry we are overworked and underfed prisoners.
Under such absurd circumstances our judgment of things becomes as
perverted as our habits. If we were habitually underworked and overfed,
our notion of heaven would be a place where everybody worked strenuously
for twenty-four hours a day and never got anything to eat.

Once realize that a perpetual holiday is beyond human endurance, and
that {}``Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do''
and it will be seen that we have no right to impose a perpetual holiday
on children. If we did, they would soon outdo the Labor Party in their
claim for a Right to Work Bill.

In any case no child should be brought up to suppose that its food
and clothes come down from heaven or are miraculously conjured from
empty space by papa. Loathsome as we have made the idea of duty (like
the idea of work) we must habituate children to a sense of repayable
obligation to the community for what they consume and enjoy, and inculcate
the repayment as a point of honor. If we did that today---and nothing
but flat dishonesty prevents us from doing it---we should have no
idle rich and indeed probably no rich, since there is no distinction
in being rich if you have to pay scot and lot in personal effort like
the working folk. Therefore, if for only half an hour a day, a child
should do something serviceable to the community.

Productive work for children has the advantage that its discipline
is the discipline of impersonal necessity, not that of wanton personal
coercion. The eagerness of children in our industrial districts to
escape from school to the factory is not caused by lighter tasks or
shorter hours in the factory, nor altogether by the temptation of
wages, nor even by the desire for novelty, but by the dignity of adult
work, the exchange of the factitious personal tyranny of the schoolmaster,
from which the grown-ups are free, for the stern but entirely dignified
Laws of Life to which all flesh is subject.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright University Schoolboyishness}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{University Schoolboyishness}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{University Schoolboyishness}

Older children might do a good deal before beginning their collegiate
education. What is the matter with our universities is that all the
students are schoolboys, whereas it is of the very essence of university
education that they should be men. The function of a university is
not to teach things that can now be taught as well or better by University
Extension lectures or by private tutors or modern correspondence classes
with gramophones. We go to them to be socialized; to acquire the hall
mark of communal training; to become citizens of the world instead
of inmates of the enlarged rabbit hutches we call homes; to learn
manners and become unchallengeable ladies and gentlemen. The social
pressure which effects these changes should be that of persons who
have faced the full responsibilities of adults as working members
of the general community, not that of a barbarous rabble of half emancipated
schoolboys and unemancipable pedants. It is true that in a reasonable
state of society this outside experience would do for us very completely
what the university does now so corruptly that we tolerate its bad
manners only because they are better than no manners at all. But the
university will always exist in some form as a community of persons
desirous of pushing their culture to the highest pitch they are capable
of, not as solitary students reading in seclusion, but as members
of a body of individuals all pursuing culture, talking culture, thinking
culture, above all, criticizing culture. If such persons are to read
and talk and criticize to any purpose, they must know the world outside
the university at least as well as the shopkeeper in the High Street
does. And this is just what they do not know at present. You may say
of them, paraphrasing Mr.\ Kipling, {}``What do they know of Plato
that only Plato know?'' If our universities would exclude everybody
who had not earned a living by his or her own exertions for at least
a couple of years, their effect would be vastly improved.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright The New Laziness}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{The New Laziness}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{The New Laziness}

The child of the future, then, if there is to be any future but one
of decay, will work more or less for its living from an early age;
and in doing so it will not shock anyone, provided there be no longer
any reason to associate the conception of children working for their
living with infants toiling in a factory for ten hours a day or boys
drudging from nine to six under gas lamps in underground city offices.
Lads and lasses in their teens will probably be able to produce as
much as the most expensive person now costs in his own person (it
is retinue that eats up the big income) without working too hard or
too long for quite as much happiness as they can enjoy. The question
to be balanced then will be, not how soon people should be put to
work, but how soon they should be released from any obligation of
the kind. A life's work is like a day's work: it can begin early and
leave off early or begin late and leave off late, or, as with us,
begin too early and never leave off at all, obviously the worst of
all possible plans. In any event we must finally reckon work, not
as the curse our schools and prisons and capitalist profit factories
make it seem today, but as a prime necessity of a tolerable existence.
And if we cannot devise fresh wants as fast as we develop the means
of supplying them, there will come a scarcity of the needed, cut-and-dried,
appointed work that is always ready to everybody's hand. It may have
to be shared out among people all of whom want more of it. And then
a new sort of laziness will become the bugbear of society: the laziness
that refuses to face the mental toil and adventure of making work
by inventing new ideas or extending the domain of knowledge, and insists
on a ready-made routine. It may come to forcing people to retire before
they are willing to make way for younger ones: that is, to driving
all persons of a certain age out of industry, leaving them to find
something experimental to occupy them on pain of perpetual holiday.
Men will then try to spend twenty thousand a year for the sake of
having to earn it. Instead of being what we are now, the cheapest
and nastiest of the animals, we shall be the costliest, most fastidious,
and best bred. In short, there is no end to the astonishing things
that may happen when the curse of Adam becomes first a blessing and
then an incurable habit. And in that day we must not grudge children
their share of it.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright The Infinite School Task}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{The Infinite School Task}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{The Infinite School
Task}

The question of children's work, however, is only a question of what
the child ought to do for the community. How highly it should qualify
itself is another matter. But most of the difficulty of inducing children
to learn would disappear if our demands became not only definite but
finite. When learning is only an excuse for imprisonment, it is an
instrument of torture which becomes more painful the more progress
is made. Thus when you have forced a child to learn the Church Catechism,
a document profound beyond the comprehension of most adults, you are
sometimes at a standstill for something else to teach; and you therefore
keep the wretched child repeating its catechism again and again until
you hit on the plan of making it learn instalments of Bible verses,
preferably from the book of Numbers. But as it is less trouble to
set a lesson that you know yourself, there is a tendency to keep repeating
the already learnt lesson rather than break new ground. At school
I began with a fairly complete knowledge of Latin grammar in the childish
sense of being able to repeat all the paradigms; and I was kept at
this, or rather kept in a class where the master never asked me to
do it because he knew I could, and therefore devoted himself to trapping
the boys who could not, until I finally forgot most of it. But when
progress took place, what did it mean? First it meant Caesar, with
the foreknowledge that to master Caesar meant only being set at Virgil,
with the culminating horror of Greek and Homer in reserve at the end
of that. I preferred Caesar, because his statement that Gaul is divided
into three parts, though neither interesting nor true, was the only
Latin sentence I could translate at sight: therefore the longer we
stuck at Caesar the better I was pleased. Just so do less classically
educated children see nothing in the mastery of addition but the beginning
of subtraction, and so on through multiplication and division and
fractions, with the black cloud of algebra on the horizon. And if
a boy rushes through all that, there is always the calculus to fall
back on, unless indeed you insist on his learning music, and proceed
to hit him if he cannot tell you the year Beethoven was born.

A child has a right to finality as regards its compulsory lessons.
Also as regards physical training. At present it is assumed that the
schoolmaster has a right to force every child into an attempt to become
Porson and Bentley, Leibnitz and Newton, all rolled into one. This
is the tradition of the oldest grammar schools. In our times an even
more horrible and cynical claim has been made for the right to drive
boys through compulsory games in the playing fields until they are
too much exhausted physically to do anything but drop off to sleep.
This is supposed to protect them from vice; but as it also protects
them from poetry, literature, music, meditation and prayer, it may
be dismissed with the obvious remark that if boarding schools are
places whose keepers are driven to such monstrous measures lest more
abominable things should happen, then the sooner boarding schools
are violently abolished the better. It is true that society may make
physical claims on the child as well as mental ones: the child must
learn to walk, to use a knife and fork, to swim, to ride a bicycle,
to acquire sufficient power of self-defence to make an attack on it
an arduous and uncertain enterprise, perhaps to fly. What as a matter
of common-sense it clearly has not a right to do is to make this an
excuse for keeping the child slaving for ten hours at physical exercises
on the ground that it is not yet as dexterous as Cinquevalli and as
strong as Sandow.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright The Rewards and Risks of Knowledge}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{The Rewards and Risks of Knowledge}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{The Rewards and Risks
of Knowledge}

In a word, we have no right to insist on educating a child; for its
education can end only with its life and will not even then be complete.
Compulsory completion of education is the last folly of a rotten and
desperate civilization. It is the rattle in its throat before dissolution.
All we can fairly do is to prescribe certain definite acquirements
and accomplishments as qualifications for certain employments; and
to secure them, not by the ridiculous method of inflicting injuries
on the persons who have not yet mastered them, but by attaching certain
privileges (not pecuniary) to the employments.

Most acquirements carry their own privileges with them. Thus a baby
has to be pretty closely guarded and imprisoned because it cannot
take care of itself. It has even to be carried about (the most complete
conceivable infringement of its liberty) until it can walk. But nobody
goes on carrying children after they can walk lest they should walk
into mischief, though Arab boys make their sisters carry them, as
our own spoiled children sometimes make their nurses, out of mere
laziness, because sisters in the East and nurses in the West are kept
in servitude. But in a society of equals (the only reasonable and
permanently possible sort of society) children are in much greater
danger of acquiring bandy legs through being left to walk before they
are strong enough than of being carried when they are well able to
walk. Anyhow, freedom of movement in a nursery is the reward of learning
to walk; and in precisely the same way freedom of movement in a city
is the reward of learning how to read public notices, and to count
and use money. The consequences are of course much larger than the
mere ability to read the name of a street or the number of a railway
platform and the destination of a train. When you enable a child to
read these, you also enable it to read this preface, to the utter
destruction, you may quite possibly think, of its morals and docility.
You also expose it to the danger of being run over by taxicabs and
trains. The moral and physical risks of education are enormous: every
new power a child acquires, from speaking, walking, and co-ordinating
its vision, to conquering continents and founding religions, opens
up immense new possibilities of mischief. Teach a child to write and
you teach it how to forge: teach it to speak and you teach it how
to lie: teach it to walk and you teach it how to kick its mother to
death.

The great problem of slavery for those whose aim is to maintain it
is the problem of reconciling the efficiency of the slave with the
helplessness that keeps him in servitude; and this problem is fortunately
not completely soluble; for it is not in fact found possible for a
duke to treat his solicitor or his doctor as he treats his laborers,
though they are all equally his slaves: the laborer being in fact
less dependent on his favor than the professional man. Hence it is
that men come to resent, of all things, protection, because it so
often means restriction of their liberty lest they should make a bad
use of it. If there are dangerous \textit{pr\'{e}cipices} about,
it is much easier and cheaper to forbid people to walk near the edge
than to put up an effective fence: that is why both legislators and
parents and the paid deputies of parents are always inhibiting and
prohibiting and punishing and scolding and laming and cramping and
delaying progress and growth instead of making the dangerous places
as safe as possible and then boldly taking and allowing others to
take the irreducible minimum of risk.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright English Physical Hardihood and Spiritual Cowardice}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{English Physical Hardihood and Spiritual
Cowardice}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{English Physical Hardihood
and Spiritual Cowardice}

It is easier to convert most people to the need for allowing their
children to run physical risks than moral ones. I can remember a relative
of mine who, when I was a small child, unused to horses and very much
afraid of them, insisted on putting me on a rather rumbustious pony
with little spurs on my heels (knowing that in my agitation I would
use them unconsciously), and being enormously amused at my terrors.
Yet when that same lady discovered that I had found a copy of The
Arabian Nights and was devouring it with avidity, she was horrified,
and hid it away from me lest it should break my soul as the pony might
have broken my neck. This way of producing hardy bodies and timid
souls is so common in country houses that you may spend hours in them
listening to stories of broken collar bones, broken backs, and broken
necks without coming upon a single spiritual adventure or daring thought.

But whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical
our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is
not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is
not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of
21 years but of 21 seconds.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright The Risks of Ignorance and Weakness}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{The Risks of Ignorance and Weakness}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{The Risks of Ignorance
and Weakness}

The difficulty with children is that they need protection from risks
they are too young to understand, and attacks they can neither avoid
nor resist. You may on academic grounds allow a child to snatch glowing
coals from the fire once. You will not do it twice. The risks of liberty
we must let everyone take; but the risks of ignorance and self-helplessness
are another matter. Not only children but adults need protection from
them. At present adults are often exposed to risks outside their knowledge
or beyond their comprehension or powers of resistance or foresight:
for example, we have to look on every day at marriages or financial
speculations that may involve far worse consequences than burnt fingers.
And just as it is part of the business of adults to protect children,
to feed them, clothe them, shelter them, and shift for them in all
sorts of ways until they are able to shift for themselves, it is coming
more and more to be seen that this is true not only of the relation
between adults and children, but between adults and adults. We shall
not always look on indifferently at foolish marriages and financial
speculations, nor allow dead men to control live communities by ridiculous
wills and living heirs to squander and ruin great estates, nor tolerate
a hundred other absurd liberties that we allow today because we are
too lazy to find out the proper way to interfere. But the interference
must be regulated by some theory of the individual's rights. Though
the right to live is absolute, it is not unconditional. If a man is
unbearably mischievous, he must be killed. This is a mere matter of
necessity, like the killing of a man-eating tiger in a nursery, a
venomous snake in the garden, or a fox in the poultry yard. No society
could be constructed on the assumption that such extermination is
a violation of the creature's right to live, and therefore must not
be allowed. And then at once arises the danger into which morality
has led us: the danger of persecution. One Christian spreading his
doctrines may seem more mischievous than a dozen thieves: throw him
therefore to the lions. A lying or disobedient child may corrupt a
whole generation and make human Society impossible: therefore thrash
the vice out of him. And so on until our whole system of abortion,
intimidation, tyranny, cruelty and the rest is in full swing again.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright The Common Sense of Toleration}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{The Common Sense of Toleration}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{The Common Sense of
Toleration}

The real safeguard against this is the dogma of Toleration. I need
not here repeat the compact treatise on it which I prepared for the
Joint Committee on the Censorship of Stage Plays, and prefixed to
The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet. It must suffice now to say that the
present must not attempt to schoolmaster the future by pretending
to know good from evil in tendency, or protect citizens against shocks
to their opinions and convictions, moral, political or religious:
in other words it must not persecute doctrines of any kind, or what
is called bad taste, and must insist on all persons facing such shocks
as they face frosty weather or any of the other disagreeable, dangerous,
or bracing incidents of freedom. The expediency of Toleration has
been forced on us by the fact that progressive enlightenment depends
on a fair hearing for doctrines which at first appear seditious, blasphemous,
and immoral, and which deeply shock people who never think originally,
thought being with them merely a habit and an echo. The deeper ground
for Toleration is the nature of creation, which, as we now know, proceeds
by evolution. Evolution finds its way by experiment; and this finding
of the way varies according to the stage of development reached, from
the blindest groping along the line of least resistance to intellectual
speculation, with its practical sequel of hypothesis and experimental
verification; or to observation, induction, and deduction; or even
into so rapid and intuitive an integration of all these processes
in a single brain that we get the inspired guess of the man of genius
and the desperate resolution of the teacher of new truths who is first
slain as a blasphemous apostate and then worshipped as a prophet.

Here the law for the child is the same as for the adult. The high
priest must not rend his garments and cry {}``Crucify him'' when
he is shocked: the atheist must not clamor for the suppression of
Law's Serious Call because it has for two centuries destroyed the
natural happiness of innumerable unfortunate children by persuading
their parents that it is their religious duty to be miserable. It,
and the Sermon on the Mount, and Machiavelli's Prince, and La Rochefoucauld's
maxims, and Hymns Ancient and Modern, and De Glanville's apologue,
and Dr.\ Watts's rhymes, and Nietzsche's Gay Science, and Ingersoll's
Mistakes of Moses, and the speeches and pamphlets of the people who
want us to make war on Germany, and the Noodle's Orations and articles
of our politicians and journalists, must all be tolerated not only
because any of them may for all we know be on the right track but
because it is in the conflict of opinion that we win knowledge and
wisdom. However terrible the wounds suffered in that conflict, they
are better than the barren peace of death that follows when all the
combatants are slaughtered or bound hand and foot.

The difficulty at present is that though this necessity for Toleration
is a law of political science as well established as the law of gravitation,
our rulers are never taught political science: on the contrary, they
are taught in school that the master tolerates nothing that is disagreeable
to him; that ruling is simply being master; and that the master's
method is the method of violent punishment. And our citizens, all
school taught, are walking in the same darkness. As I write these
lines the Home Secretary is explaining that a man who has been imprisoned
for blasphemy must not be released because his remarks were painful
to the feelings of his pious fellow townsmen. Now it happens that
this very Home Secretary has driven many thousands of his fellow citizens
almost beside themselves by the crudity of his notions of government,
and his simple inability to understand why he should not use and make
laws to torment and subdue people who do not happen to agree with
him. In a word, he is not a politician, but a grown-up schoolboy who
has at last got a cane in his hand. And as all the rest of us are
in the same condition (except as to command of the cane) the only
objection made to his proceedings takes the shape of clamorous demands
that \textit{he} should be caned instead of being allowed to cane
other people.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright The Sin of Athanasius}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{The Sin of Athanasius}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{The Sin of Athanasius}

It seems hopeless. Anarchists are tempted to preach a violent and
implacable resistance to all law as the only remedy; and the result
of that speedily is that people welcome any tyranny that will rescue
them from chaos. But there is really no need to choose between anarchy
and tyranny. A quite reasonable state of things is practicable if
we proceed on human assumptions and not on academic ones. If adults
will frankly give up their claim to know better than children what
the purposes of the Life Force are, and treat the child as an experiment
like themselves, and possibly a more successful one, and at the same
time relinquish their monstrous parental claims to personal private
property in children, the rest must be left to common sense. It is
our attitude, our religion, that is wrong. A good beginning might
be made by enacting that any person dictating a piece of conduct to
a child or to anyone else as the will of God, or as absolutely right,
should be dealt with as a blasphemer: as, indeed, guilty of the unpardonable
sin against the Holy Ghost. If the penalty were death, it would rid
us at once of that scourge of humanity, the amateur Pope. As an Irish
Protestant, I raise the cry of No Popery with hereditary zest. We
are overrun with Popes. From curates and governesses, who may claim
a sort of professional standing, to parents and uncles and nurserymaids
and school teachers and wiseacres generally, there are scores of thousands
of human insects groping through our darkness by the feeble phosphorescence
of their own tails, yet ready at a moment's notice to reveal the will
of God on every possible subject; to explain how and why the universe
was made (in my youth they added the exact date) and the circumstances
under which it will cease to exist; to lay down precise rules of right
and wrong conduct; to discriminate infallibly between virtuous and
vicious character; and all this with such certainty that they are
prepared to visit all the rigors of the law, and all the ruinous penalties
of social ostracism on people, however harmless their actions maybe
who venture to laugh at their monstrous conceit or to pay their assumptions
the extravagant compliment of criticizing them. As to children, who
shall say what canings and birchings and terrifyings and threats of
hell fire and impositions and humiliations and petty imprisonings
and sendings to bed and standing in corners and the like they have
suffered because their parents and guardians and teachers knew everything
so much better than Socrates or Solon?

It is this ignorant uppishness that does the mischief. A stranger
on the planet might expect that its grotesque absurdity would provoke
enough ridicule to cure it; but unfortunately quite the contrary happens.
Just as our ill health delivers us into the hands of medical quacks
and creates a passionate demand for impudent pretences that doctors
can cure the diseases they themselves die of daily, so our ignorance
and helplessness set us clamoring for spiritual and moral quacks who
pretend that they can save our souls from their own damnation. If
a doctor were to say to his patients, {}``I am familiar with your
symptoms, because I have seen other people in your condition; and
I will bring the very little knowledge we have to your treatment;
but except in that very shallow sense I \textit{dont} know what is
the matter with you; and I cant undertake to cure you,'' he would
be a lost man professionally; and if a clergyman, on being called
on to award a prize for good conduct in the village school, were to
say, {}``I am afraid I cannot say who is the best-behaved child,
because I really do not know what good conduct is; but I will gladly
take the teacher's word as to which child has caused least inconvenience,''
he would probably be unfrocked, if not excommunicated. And yet no
honest and intellectually capable doctor or parson can say more. Clearly
it would not be wise of the doctor to say it, because optimistic lies
have such immense therapeutic value that a doctor who cannot tell
them convincingly has mistaken his profession. And a clergyman who
is not prepared to lay down the law dogmatically will not be of much
use in a village school, though it behoves him all the more to be
very careful what law he lays down. But unless both the clergyman
and the doctor are in the attitude expressed by these speeches they
are not fit for their work. The man who believes that he has more
than a provisional hypothesis to go upon is a born fool. He may have
to act vigorously on it. The world has no use for the Agnostic who
wont believe anything because anything might be false, and wont deny
anything because anything might be true. But there is a wide difference
between saying, {}``I believe this; and I am going to act on it,''
or, {}``I \textit{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 to refuse to act
on it.'' The difference is as great as that between the Apostles'
Creed and the Athanasian Creed. When you repeat the Apostles' Creed
you affirm that you believe certain things. There you are clearly
within your rights. When you repeat the Athanasian Creed, you affirm
that certain things are so, and that anybody who doubts that they
are so cannot be saved. And this is simply a piece of impudence on
your part, as you know nothing about it except that as good men as
you have never heard of your creed. The apostolic attitude is a desire
to convert others to our beliefs for the sake of sympathy and light:
the Athanasian attitude is a desire to murder people who \textit{dont}
\textit{agree} with us. I am sufficient of an Athanasian to advocate
a law for the speedy execution of all Athanasians, because they violate
the fundamental proposition of my creed, which is, I repeat, that
all living creatures are experiments. The precise formula for the
Superman, \textit{ci-devant} The Just Man Made Perfect, has not yet
been discovered. Until it is, every birth is an experiment in the
Great Research which is being conducted by the Life Force to discover
that formula.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright The Experiment Experimenting}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{The Experiment Experimenting}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{The Experiment Experimenting}

And now all the modern schoolmaster abortionists will rise up beaming,
and say, {}``We quite agree. We regard every child in our school
as a subject for experiment. We are always experimenting with them.
We challenge the experimental test for our system. We are continually
guided by our experience in our great work of moulding the character
of our future citizens, \textit{etc}.\ \textit{etc}.\ \textit{etc}.''
I am sorry to seem irreconcilable; but it is the Life Force that has
to make the experiment and not the schoolmaster; and the Life Force
for the child's purpose is in the child and not in the schoolmaster.
The schoolmaster is another experiment; and a laboratory in which
all the experiments began experimenting on one another would not produce
intelligible results. I admit, however, that if my schoolmasters had
treated me as an experiment of the Life Force: that is, if they had
set me free to do as I liked subject only to my political rights and
theirs, they could not have watched the experiment very long, because
the first result would have been a rapid movement on my part in the
direction of the door, and my disappearance there-through.

It may be worth inquiring where I should have gone to. I should say
that practically every time I should have gone to a much more educational
place. I should have gone into the country, or into the sea, or into
the National Gallery, or to hear a band if there was one, or to any
library where there were no schoolbooks. I should have read very dry
and difficult books: for example, though nothing would have induced
me to read the budget of stupid party lies that served as a text-book
of history in school, I remember reading Robertson's Charles V.\ and
his history of Scotland from end to end most laboriously. Once, stung
by the airs of a schoolfellow who alleged that he had read Locke On
The Human Understanding, I attempted to read the Bible straight through,
and actually got to the Pauline Epistles before I broke down in disgust
at what seemed to me their inveterate crookedness of mind. If there
had been a school where children were really free, I should have had
to be driven out of it for the sake of my health by the teachers;
for the children to whom a literary education can be of any use are
insatiable: they will read and study far more than is good for them.
In fact the real difficulty is to prevent them from wasting their
time by reading for the sake of reading and studying for the sake
of studying, instead of taking some trouble to find out what they
really like and are capable of doing some good at. Some silly person
will probably interrupt me here with the remark that many children
have no appetite for a literary education at all, and would never
open a book if they were not forced to. I have known many such persons
who have been forced to the point of obtaining University degrees.
And for all the effect their literary exercises has left on them they
might just as well have been put on the treadmill. In fact they are
actually less literate than the treadmill would have left them; for
they might by chance have picked up and dipped into a volume of Shakespear
or a translation of Homer if they had not been driven to loathe every
famous name in literature. I should probably know as much Latin as
French, if Latin had not been made the excuse for my school imprisonment
and degradation.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Why We Loathe Learning and Love Sport}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Why We Loathe Learning and Love Sport}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Why We Loathe Learning
and Love Sport}

If we are to discuss the importance of art, learning, and intellectual
culture, the first thing we have to recognize is that we have very
little of them at present; and that this little has not been produced
by compulsory education: nay, that the scarcity is unnatural and has
been produced by the violent exclusion of art and artists from schools.
On the other hand we have quite a considerable degree of bodily culture:
indeed there is a continual outcry against the sacrifice of mental
accomplishments to athletics. In other words a sacrifice of the professed
object of compulsory education to the real object of voluntary education.
It is assumed that this means that people prefer bodily to mental
culture; but may it not mean that they prefer liberty and satisfaction
to coercion and privation. Why is it that people who have been taught
Shakespear as a school subject loathe his plays and cannot by any
means be persuaded ever to open his works after they escape from school,
whereas there is still, 300 years after his death, a wide and steady
sale for his works to people who read his plays as plays, and not
as task work? If Shakespear, or for that matter, Newton and Leibnitz,
are allowed to find their readers and students they will find them.
If their works are annotated and paraphrased by dullards, and the
annotations and paraphrases forced on all young people by imprisonment
and flogging and scolding, there will not be a single man of letters
or higher mathematician the more in the country: on the contrary there
will be less, as so many potential lovers of literature and mathematics
will have been incurably prejudiced against them. Everyone who is
conversant with the class in which child imprisonment and compulsory
schooling is carried out to the final extremity of the university
degree knows that its scholastic culture is a sham; that it knows
little about literature or art and a great deal about point-to-point
races; and that the village cobbler, who has never read a page of
Plato, and is admittedly a dangerously ignorant man politically, is
nevertheless a Socrates compared to the classically educated gentlemen
who discuss politics in country houses at election time (and at no
other time) after their day's earnest and skilful shooting. Think
of the years and years of weary torment the women of the piano-possessing
class have been forced to spend over the keyboard, fingering scales.
How many of them could be bribed to attend a pianoforte recital by
a great player, though they will rise from sick beds rather than miss
Ascot or Goodwood?

Another familiar fact that teaches the same lesson is that many women
who have voluntarily attained a high degree of culture cannot add
up their own housekeeping books, though their education in simple
arithmetic was compulsory, whereas their higher education has been
wholly voluntary. Everywhere we find the same result. The imprisonment,
the beating, the taming and laming, the breaking of young spirits,
the arrest of development, the atrophy of all inhibitive power except
the power of fear, are real: the education is sham. Those who have
been taught most know least.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Antichrist}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Antichrist}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Antichrist}

Among the worst effects of the unnatural segregation of children in
schools and the equally unnatural constant association of them with
adults in the family is the utter defeat of the vital element in Christianity.
Christ stands in the world for that intuition of the highest humanity
that we, being members one of another, must not complain, must not
scold, must not strike, nor revile nor persecute nor revenge nor punish.
Now family life and school life are, as far as the moral training
of children is concerned, nothing but the deliberate inculcation of
a routine of complaint, scolding, punishment, persecution, and revenge
as the natural and only possible way of dealing with evil or inconvenience.
{}``Aint nobody to be whopped for this here?'' exclaimed Sam Weller
when he saw his employer's name written up on a stage coach, and conceived
the phenomenon as an insult which reflected on himself. This exclamation
of Sam Weller is at once the negation of Christianity and the beginning
and the end of current morality; and so it will remain as long as
the family and the school persist as we know them: that is, as long
as the rights of children are so utterly denied that nobody will even
take the trouble to ascertain what they are, and coming of age is
like the turning of a convict into the street after twenty-one years
penal servitude. Indeed it is worse; for the convict may have learnt
before his conviction how to live in freedom and may remember how
to set about it, however lamed his powers of freedom may have become
through disuse; but the child knows no other way of life but the slave's
way. Born free, as Rousseau says, he has been laid hands on by slaves
from the moment of his birth and brought up as a slave. How is he,
when he is at last set free, to be anything else than the slave he
actually is, clamoring for war, for the lash, for police, prisons,
and scaffolds in a wild panic of delusion that without these things
he is lost. The grown-up Englishman is to the end of his days a badly
brought-up child, beyond belief quarrelsome, petulant, selfish, destructive,
and cowardly: afraid that the Germans will come and enslave him; that
the burglar will come and rob him; that the bicycle or motor car will
run over him; that the smallpox will attack him; and that the devil
will run away with him and empty him out like a sack of coals on a
blazing fire unless his nurse or his parents or his schoolmaster or
his bishop or his judge or his army or his navy will do something
to frighten these bad things away. And this Englishman, without the
moral courage of a louse, will risk his neck for fun fifty times every
winter in the hunting field, and at \textit{\emph{Badajos}} sieges
and the like will ram his head into a hole bristling with sword blades
rather than be beaten in the one department in which he has been brought
up to consult his own honor. As a Sportsman (and war is fundamentally
the sport of hunting and fighting the most dangerous of the beasts
of prey) he feels free. He will tell you himself that the true sportsman
is never a snob, a coward, a duffer, a cheat, a thief, or a liar.
Curious, is it not, that he has not the same confidence in other sorts
of man?

And even sport is losing its freedom. Soon everybody will be schooled,
mentally and physically, from the cradle to the end of the term of
adult compulsory military service, and finally of compulsory civil
service lasting until the age of superannuation. Always more schooling,
more compulsion. We are to be cured by an excess of the dose that
has poisoned us. Satan is to cast out Satan.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Under the Whip}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Under the Whip}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Under the Whip}

Clearly this will not do. We must reconcile education with liberty.
We must find out some means of making men workers and, if need be,
warriors, without making them slaves. We must cultivate the noble
virtues that have their root in pride. Now no schoolmaster will teach
these any more than a prison governor will teach his prisoners how
to mutiny and escape. Self-preservation forces him to break the spirit
that revolts against him, and to inculcate submission, even to obscene
assault, as a duty. A bishop once had the hardihood to say that he
would rather see England free than England sober. Nobody has yet dared
to say that he would rather see an England of ignoramuses than an
England of cowards and slaves. And if anyone did, it would be necessary
to point out that the antithesis is not a practical one, as we have
got at present an England of ignoramuses who are also cowards and
slaves, and extremely proud of it at that, because in school they
are taught to submit, with what they ridiculously call Oriental fatalism
(as if any Oriental has ever submitted more helplessly and sheepishly
to robbery and oppression than we \textit{\emph{Occidentals}} do),
to be driven day after day into compounds and set to the tasks they
loathe by the men they hate and fear, as if this were the inevitable
destiny of mankind. And naturally, when they grow up, they helplessly
exchange the prison of the school for the prison of the mine or the
workshop or the office, and drudge along stupidly and miserably, with
just enough gregarious instinct to turn furiously on any intelligent
person who proposes a change. It would be quite easy to make England
a paradise, according to our present ideas, in a few years. There
is no mystery about it: the way has been pointed out over and over
again. The difficulty is not the way but the will. And we have no
will because the first thing done with us in childhood was to break
our will. Can anything be more disgusting than the spectacle of a
nation reading the biography of Gladstone and gloating over the account
of how he was flogged at Eton, two of his schoolfellows being compelled
to hold him down whilst he was flogged. Not long ago a public body
in England had to deal with the case of a schoolmaster who, conceiving
himself insulted by the smoking of a cigaret against his orders by
a pupil eighteen years old, proposed to flog him publicly as a satisfaction
to what he called his honor and authority. I had intended to give
the particulars of this ease, but find the drudgery of repeating such
stuff too sickening, and the effect unjust to a man who was doing
only what others all over the country were doing as part of the established
routine of what is called education. The astounding part of it was
the manner in which the person to whom this outrage on decency seemed
quite proper and natural claimed to be a functionary of high character,
and had his claim allowed. In Japan he would hardly have been allowed
the privilege of committing suicide. What is to be said of a profession
in which such obscenities are made points of honor, or of institutions
in which they are an accepted part of the daily routine? Wholesome
people would not argue about the taste of such nastinesses: they would
spit them out; but we are tainted with flagellomania from our childhood.
When will we realize that the fact that we can become accustomed to
anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary for us to
examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to? Before
motor cars became common, necessity had accustomed us to a foulness
in our streets which would have horrified us had the street been our
drawing-room carpet. Before long we shall be as particular about our
streets as we now are about our carpets; and their condition in the
nineteenth century will become as forgotten and incredible as the
condition of the corridors of palaces and the courts of castles was
as late as the eighteenth century. This foulness, we can plead, was
imposed on us as a necessity by the use of horses and of huge retinues;
but flogging has never been so imposed: it has always been a vice,
craved for on any pretext by those depraved by it. Boys were flogged
when criminals were hanged, to impress the awful warning on them.
Boys were flogged at boundaries, to impress the boundaries on their
memory. Other methods and other punishments were always available:
the choice of this one betrayed the sensual impulse which makes the
practice an abomination. But when its viciousness made it customary,
it was practised and tolerated on all hands by people who were innocent
of anything worse than stupidity, ill temper, and inability to discover
other methods of maintaining order than those they had always seen
practised and approved of. From children and animals it extended to
slaves and criminals. In the days of Moses it was limited to 39 lashes.
In the early nineteenth century it had become an open madness: soldiers
were sentenced to a thousand lashes for trifling offences, with the
result (among others less mentionable) that the Iron Duke of Wellington
complained that it was impossible to get an order obeyed in the British
army except in two or three crack regiments. Such frantic excesses
of this disgusting neurosis provoked a reaction against it; but the
clamor for it by depraved persons never ceased, and was tolerated
by a nation trained to it from childhood in the schools until last
year (1913), when in what must be described as a paroxysm of sexual
excitement provoked by the agitation concerning the White Slave Traffic
(the purely commercial nature of which I was prevented from exposing
on the stage by the Censorship twenty years ago) the Government yielded
to an outcry for flagellation led by the Archbishop of Canterbury,
and passed an Act under which a judge can sentence a man to be flogged
to the utmost extremity with any instrument usable for such a purpose
that he cares to prescribe. Such an Act is not a legislative phenomenon
but a psychopathic one. Its effect on the White Slave Traffic was,
of course, to distract public attention from its real cause and from
the people who really profit by it to imaginary {}``foreign scoundrels,''
and to secure a monopoly of its organization for women.

And all this evil is made possible by the schoolmaster with his cane
and birch, by the parents getting rid as best they can of the nuisance
of children making noise and mischief in the house, and by the denial
to children of the elementary rights of human beings.

The first man who enslaved and {}``broke in'' an animal with a whip
would have invented the explosion engine instead could he have foreseen
the curse he was laying on his race. For men and women learnt thereby
to enslave and break in their children by the same means. These children,
grown up, knew no other methods of training. Finally the evil that
was done for gain by the greedy was refined on and done for pleasure
by the lustful. Flogging has become a pleasure purchasable in our
streets, and inhibition a grown-up habit that children play at. {}``Go
and see what baby is doing; and tell him he mustnt'' is the last
word of the nursery; and the grimmest aspect of it is that it was
first formulated by a comic paper as a capital joke.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Technical Instruction}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Technical Instruction}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Technical Instruction}

Technical instruction tempts to violence (as a short cut) more than
liberal education. The sailor in Mr Rudyard Kipling's Captains Courageous,
teaching the boy the names of the ship's tackle with a rope's end,
does not disgust us as our schoolmasters do, especially as the boy
was a spoiled boy. But an unspoiled boy would not have needed that
drastic medicine. Technical training may be as tedious as learning
to skate or to play the piano or violin; but it is the price one must
pay to achieve certain desirable results or necessary ends. It is
a monstrous thing to force a child to learn Latin or Greek or mathematics
on the ground that they are an indispensable gymnastic for the mental
powers. It would be monstrous even if it were true; for there is no
labor that might not be imposed on a child or an adult on the same
pretext; but as a glance at the average products of our public school
and university education shews that it is not true, it need not trouble
us. But it is a fact that ignorance of Latin and Greek and mathematics
closes certain careers to men (I do not mean artificial, unnecessary,
noxious careers like those of the commercial schoolmaster). Languages,
even dead ones, have their uses; and, as it seems to many of us, mathematics
have their uses. They will always be learned by people who want to
learn them; and people will always want to learn them as long as they
are of any importance in life: indeed the want will survive their
importance: superstition is nowhere stronger than in the field of
obsolete acquirements. And they will never be learnt fruitfully by
people who do not want to learn them either for their own sake or
for use in necessary work. There is no harder schoolmaster than experience;
and yet experience fails to teach where there is no desire to learn.

Still, one must not begin to apply this generalization too early.
And this brings me to an important factor in the case: the factor
of evolution.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Docility and Dependence}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Docility and Dependence}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Docility and Dependence}

If anyone, impressed by my view that the rights of a child are precisely
those of an adult, proceeds to treat a child as if it were an adult,
he (or she) will find that though the plan will work much better at
some points than the usual plan, at others it will not work at all;
and this discovery may provoke him to turn back from the whole conception
of children's rights with a jest at the expense of bachelors' and
old maids' children. In dealing with children what is needed is not
logic but sense. There is no logical reason why young persons should
be allowed greater control of their property the day after they are
twenty-one than the day before it. There is no logical reason why
I, who strongly object to an adult standing over a boy of ten with
a Latin grammar, and saying, {}``you must learn this, whether you
want to or not,'' should nevertheless be quite prepared to stand
over a boy of five with the multiplication table or a copy book or
a code of elementary good manners, and practice on his docility to
make him learn them. And there is no logical reason why I should do
for a child a great many little offices, some of them troublesome
and disagreeable, which I should not do for a boy twice its age, or
support a boy or girl when I would unhesitatingly throw an adult on
his own resources. But there are practical reasons, and sensible reasons,
and affectionate reasons for all these illogicalities. Children do
not want to be treated altogether as adults: such treatment terrifies
them and over-burdens them with responsibility. In truth, very few
adults care to be called on for independence and originality: they
also are bewildered and terrified in the absence of precedents and
precepts and commandments; but modern Democracy allows them a sanctioning
and cancelling power if they are capable of using it, which children
are not. To treat a child wholly as an adult would be to mock and
destroy it. Infantile docility and juvenile dependence are, like death,
a product of Natural Selection; and though there is no viler crime
than to abuse them, yet there is no greater cruelty than to ignore
them. I have complained sufficiently of what I suffered through the
process of assault, imprisonment, and compulsory lessons that taught
me nothing, which are called my schooling. But I could say a good
deal also about the things I was not taught and should have been taught,
not to mention the things I was allowed to do which I should not have
been allowed to do. I have no recollection of being taught to read
or write; so I presume I was born with both faculties; but many people
seem to have bitter recollections of being forced reluctantly to acquire
them. And though I have the uttermost contempt for a teacher so ill
mannered and incompetent as to be unable to make a child learn to
read and write without also making it cry, still I am prepared to
admit that I had rather have been compelled to learn to read and write
with tears by an incompetent and ill mannered person than left in
ignorance. Reading, writing, and enough arithmetic to use money honestly
and accurately, together with the rudiments of law and order, become
necessary conditions of a child's liberty before it can appreciate
the importance of its liberty, or foresee that these accomplishments
are worth acquiring. Nature has provided for this by evolving the
instinct of docility. Children are very docile: they have a sound
intuition that they must do what they are told or perish. And adults
have an intuition, equally sound, that they must take advantage of
this docility to teach children how to live properly or the children
will not survive. The difficulty is to know where to stop. To illustrate
this, let us consider the main danger of childish docility and parental
officiousness.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright The Abuse of Docility}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{The Abuse of Docility}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{The Abuse of Docility}

Docility may survive as a lazy habit long after it has ceased to be
a beneficial instinct. If you catch a child when it is young enough
to be instinctively docile, and keep it in a condition of unremitted
tutelage under the nurserymaid, the governess, the preparatory school,
the secondary school, and the university, until it is an adult, you
will produce, not a self-reliant, free, fully matured human being,
but a grown-up schoolboy or schoolgirl, capable of nothing in the
way of original or independent action except outbursts of naughtiness
in the women and blackguardism in the men. That is exactly what we
get at present in our rich and consequently governing classes: they
pass from juvenility to senility without ever touching maturity except
in body. The classes which cannot afford this sustained tutelage are
notably more self-reliant and grown-up: an office boy of fifteen is
often more of a man than a university student of twenty. Unfortunately
this precocity is disabled by poverty, ignorance, narrowness, and
a hideous power of living without art or love or beauty and being
rather proud of it. The poor never escape from servitude: their docility
is preserved by their slavery. And so all become the prey of the greedy,
the selfish, the domineering, the unscrupulous, the predatory. If
here and there an individual refuses to be docile, ten docile persons
will beat him or lock him up or shoot him or hang him at the bidding
of his oppressors and their own. The crux of the whole difficulty
about parents, schoolmasters, priests, absolute monarchs, and despots
of every sort, is the tendency to abuse natural docility. A nation
should always be healthily rebellious; but the king or prime minister
has yet to be found who will make trouble by cultivating that side
of the national spirit. A child should begin to assert itself early,
and shift for itself more and more not only in washing and dressing
itself, but in opinions and conduct; yet as nothing is so exasperating
and so unlovable as an uppish child, it is useless to expect parents
and schoolmasters to inculcate this uppishness. Such unamiable precepts
as Always contradict an authoritative statement, Always return a blow,
Never lose a chance of a good fight, When you are scolded for a mistake
ask the person who scolds you whether he or she supposes you did it
on purpose, and follow the question with a blow or an insult or some
other unmistakable expression of resentment, Remember that the progress
of the world depends on your knowing better than your elders, are
just as important as those of The Sermon on the Mount; but no one
has yet seen them written up in letters of gold in a schoolroom or
nursery. The child is taught to be kind, to be respectful, to be quiet,
not to answer back, to be truthful when its elders want to find out
anything from it, to lie when the truth would shock or hurt its elders,
to be above all things obedient, and to be seen and not heard. Here
we have two sets of precepts, each warranted to spoil a child hopelessly
if the other be omitted. Unfortunately we do not allow fair play between
them. The rebellious, intractable, aggressive, selfish set provoke
a corrective resistance, and do not pretend to high moral or religious
sanctions; and they are never urged by grown-up people on young people.
They are therefore more in danger of neglect or suppression than the
other set, which have all the adults, all the laws, all the religions
on their side. How is the child to be secured its due share of both
bodies of doctrine?


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright The Schoolboy and the Homeboy}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{The Schoolboy and the Homeboy}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{The Schoolboy and the
Homeboy}

In practice what happens is that parents notice that boys brought
up at home become mollycoddles, or prigs, or duffers, unable to take
care of themselves. They see that boys should learn to rough it a
little and to mix with children of their own age. This is natural
enough. When you have preached at and punished a boy until he is a
moral cripple, you are as much hampered by him as by a physical cripple;
and as you do not intend to have him on your hands all your life,
and are generally rather impatient for the day when he will earn his
own living and leave you to attend to yourself, you sooner or later
begin to talk to him about the need for self-reliance, learning to
think, and so forth, with the result that your victim, bewildered
by your inconsistency, concludes that there is no use trying to please
you, and falls into an attitude of sulky resentment. Which is an additional
inducement to pack him off to school.

In school, he finds himself in a dual world, under two dispensations.
There is the world of the boys, where the point of honor is to be
untameable, always ready to fight, ruthless in taking the conceit
out of anyone who ventures to give himself airs of superior knowledge
or taste, and generally to take Lucifer for one's model. And there
is the world of the masters, the world of discipline, submission,
diligence, obedience, and continual and shameless assumption of moral
and intellectual authority. Thus the schoolboy hears both sides, and
is so far better off than the homebred boy who hears only one. But
the two sides are not fairly presented. They are presented as good
and evil, as vice and virtue, as villainy and heroism. The boy feels
mean and cowardly when he obeys, and selfish and rascally when he
disobeys. He looses his moral courage just as he comes to hate books
and languages. In the end, John Ruskin, tied so close to his mother's
apron-string that he did not escape even when he went to Oxford, and
John Stuart Mill, whose father ought to have been prosecuted for laying
his son's childhood waste with lessons, were superior, as products
of training, to our schoolboys. They were very conspicuously superior
in moral courage; and though they did not distinguish themselves at
cricket and football, they had quite as much physical hardihood as
any civilized man needs. But it is to be observed that Ruskin's parents
were wise people who gave John a full share in their own life, and
put up with his presence both at home and abroad when they must sometimes
have been very weary of him; and Mill, as it happens, was deliberately
educated to challenge all the most sacred institutions of his country.
The households they were brought up in were no more average households
than a Montessori school is an average school.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright The Comings of Age of Children}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{The Comings of Age of Children}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{The Comings of Age of
Children}

All this inculcated adult docility, which wrecks every civilization
as it is wrecking ours, is inhuman and unnatural. We must reconsider
our institution of the Coming of Age, which is too late for some purposes,
and too early for others. There should be a series of Coming of Ages
for every individual. The mammals have their first coming of age when
they are weaned; and it is noteworthy that this rather cruel and selfish
operation on the part of the parent has to be performed resolutely,
with claws and teeth; for your little mammal does not want to be weaned,
and yields only to a pretty rough assertion of the right of the parent
to be relieved of the child as soon as the child is old enough to
bear the separation. The same thing occurs with children: they hang
on to the mother's apron-string and the father's coat tails as long
as they can, often baffling those sensitive parents who know that
children should think for themselves and fend for themselves, but
are too kind to throw them on their own resources with the ferocity
of the domestic cat. The child should have its first coming of age
when it is weaned, another when it can talk, another when it can walk,
another when it can dress itself without assistance; and when it can
read, write, count money, and pass an examination in going a simple
errand involving a purchase and a journey by rail or other public
method of locomotion, it should have quite a majority. At present
the children of laborers are soon mobile and able to shift for themselves,
whereas it is possible to find grown-up women in the rich classes
who are actually afraid to take a walk in the streets unattended and
unprotected. It is true that this is a superstition from the time
when a retinue was part of the state of persons of quality, and the
unattended person was supposed to be a common person of no quality,
earning a living; but this has now become so absurd that children
and young women are no longer told why they are forbidden to go about
alone, and have to be persuaded that the streets are dangerous places,
which of course they are; but people who are not educated to live
dangerously have only half a life, and are more likely to die miserably
after all than those who have taken all the common risks of freedom
from their childhood onward as matters of course.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright The Conflict of Wills}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{The Conflict of Wills}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{The Conflict of Wills}

The world wags in spite of its schools and its families because both
schools and families are mostly very largely anarchic: parents and
schoolmasters are good-natured or weak or lazy; and children are docile
and affectionate and very shortwinded in their fits of naughtiness;
and so most families slummock along and muddle through until the children
cease to be children. In the few cases when the parties are energetic
and determined, the child is crushed or the parent is reduced to a
cipher, as the case may be. When the opposed forces are neither of
them strong enough to annihilate the other, there is serious trouble:
that is how we get those feuds between parent and child which recur
to our memory so ironically when we hear people sentimentalizing about
natural affection. We even get tragedies; for there is nothing so
tragic to contemplate or so devastating to suffer as the oppression
of will without conscience; and the whole tendency of our family and
school system is to set the will of the parent and the school despot
above conscience as something that must be deferred to abjectly and
absolutely for its own sake.

The strongest, fiercest force in nature is human will. It is the highest
organization we know of the will that has created the whole universe.
Now all honest civilization, religion, law, and convention is an attempt
to keep this force within beneficent bounds. What corrupts civilization,
religion, law, and convention (and they are at present pretty nearly
as corrupt as they dare) is the constant attempts made by the wills
of individuals and classes to thwart the wills and enslave the powers
of other individuals and classes. The powers of the parent and the
schoolmaster, and of their public analogues the lawgiver and the judge,
become instruments of tyranny in the hands of those who are too narrow-minded
to understand law and exercise judgment; and in their hands (with
us they mostly fall into such hands) law becomes tyranny. And what
is a tyrant? Quite simply a person who says to another person, young
or old, {}``You shall do as I tell you; you shall make what I want;
you shall profess my creed; you shall have no will of your own; and
your powers shall be at the disposal of my will.'' It has come to
this at last: that the phrase {}``she has a will of her own,'' or
{}``he has a will of his own'' has come to denote a person of exceptional
obstinacy and self-assertion. And even persons of good natural disposition,
if brought up to expect such deference, are roused to unreasoning
fury, and sometimes to the commission of atrocious crimes, by the
slightest challenge to their authority. Thus a laborer may be dirty,
drunken, untruthful, slothful, untrustworthy in every way without
exhausting the indulgence of the country house. But let him dare to
be {}``disrespectful'' and he is a lost man, though he be the cleanest,
soberest, most diligent, most veracious, most trustworthy man in the
county. Dickens's instinct for detecting social cankers never served
him better than when he shewed us Mrs Heep teaching her son to {}``be
umble,'' knowing that if he carried out that precept he might be
pretty well anything else he liked. The maintenance of deference to
our wills becomes a mania which will carry the best of us to any extremity.
We will allow a village of Egyptian fellaheen or Indian tribesmen
to live the lowest life they please among themselves without molestation;
but let one of them slay an Englishman or even strike him on the strongest
provocation, and straightway we go stark mad, burning and destroying,
shooting and shelling, flogging and hanging, if only such survivors
as we may leave are thoroughly cowed in the presence of a man with
a white face. In the committee room of a local council or city corporation,
the humblest employees of the committee find defenders if they complain
of harsh treatment. Gratuities are voted, indulgences and holidays
are pleaded for, delinquencies are excused in the most sentimental
manner provided only the employee, however patent a hypocrite or incorrigible
a slacker, is hat in hand. But let the most obvious measure of justice
be demanded by the secretary of a Trade Union in terms which omit
all expressions of subservience, and it is with the greatest difficulty
that the cooler-headed can defeat angry motions that the letter be
thrown into the waste paper basket and the committee proceed to the
next business.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright The Demagogue's Opportunity}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{The Demagogue's Opportunity}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{The Demagogues Opportunity}

And the employee has in him the same fierce impulse to impose his
will without respect for the will of others. Democracy is in practice
nothing but a device for cajoling from him the vote he refuses to
arbitrary authority. He will not vote for Coriolanus; but when an
experienced demagogue comes along and says, {}``Sir: \textit{you}
are the dictator: the voice of the people is the voice of God; and
I am only your very humble servant,'' he says at once, {}``All right:
tell me what to dictate,'' and is presently enslaved more effectually
with his own silly consent than Coriolanus would ever have enslaved
him without asking his leave. And the trick by which the demagogue
defeats Coriolanus is played on him in his turn by \textit{his} inferiors.
Everywhere we see the cunning succeeding in the world by seeking a
rich or powerful master and practising on his lust for subservience.
The political adventurer who gets into parliament by offering himself
to the poor voter, not as his representative but as his will-less
soulless {}``delegate,'' is himself the dupe of a clever wife who
repudiates Votes for Women, knowing well that whilst the man is master,
the man's mistress will rule. Uriah Heep may be a crawling creature;
but his crawling takes him upstairs.

Thus does the selfishness of the will turn on itself, and obtain by
flattery what it cannot seize by open force. Democracy becomes the
latest trick of tyranny: {}``womanliness'' becomes the latest wile
of prostitution.

Between parent and child the same conflict wages and the same destruction
of character ensues. Parents set themselves to bend the will of their
children to their own---to break their stubborn spirit, as they call
it---with the ruthlessness of Grand Inquisitors. Cunning, unscrupulous
children learn all the arts of the sneak in circumventing tyranny:
children of better character are cruelly distressed and more or less
lamed for life by it.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Our Quarrelsomeness}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Our Quarrelsomeness}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Our Quarrelsomeness}

As between adults, we find a general quarrelsomeness which makes political
reform as impossible to most Englishmen as to hogs. Certain sections
of the nation get cured of this disability. University men, sailors,
and politicians are comparatively free from it, because the communal
life of the University, the fact that in a ship a man must either
learn to consider others or else go overboard or into irons, and the
habit of working on committees and ceasing to expect more of one's
own way than is included in the greatest common measure of the committee,
educate the will socially. But no one who has ever had to guide a
committee of ordinary private Englishmen through their first attempts
at collective action, in committee or otherwise, can retain any illusions
as to the appalling effects on our national manners and character
of the organization of the home and the school as petty \textit{\emph{tyrannies}},
and the absence of all teaching of self-respect and training in self-assertion.
Bullied and ordered about, the Englishman obeys like a sheep, evades
like a knave, or tries to murder his oppressor. Merely criticized
or opposed in committee, or invited to consider anybody's views but
his own, he feels personally insulted and wants to resign or leave
the room unless he is apologized to. And his panic and bewilderment
when he sees that the older hands at the work have no patience with
him and do not intend to treat him as infallible, are pitiable as
far as they are anything but ludicrous. That is what comes of not
being taught to consider other people's wills, and left to submit
to them or to over-ride them as if they were the winds and the weather.
Such a state of mind is incompatible not only with the democratic
introduction of high civilization, but with the comprehension and
maintenance of such civilized institutions as have been introduced
by benevolent and intelligent despots and aristocrats.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright We Must Reform Society before we can Reform
Ourselves}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{We Must Reform Society}

When we come to the positive problem of what to do with children if
we are to give up the established plan, we find the difficulties so
great that we begin to understand why so many people who detest the
system and look back with loathing on their own schooldays, must helplessly
send their children to the very schools they themselves were sent
to, because there is no alternative except abandoning the children
to undisciplined vagabondism. Man in society must do as everybody
else does in his class: only fools and romantic novices imagine that
freedom is a mere matter of the readiness of the individual to snap
his fingers at convention. It is true that most of us live in a condition
of quite unnecessary inhibition, wearing ugly and uncomfortable clothes,
making ourselves and other people miserable by the heathen horrors
of mourning, staying away from the theatre because we cannot afford
the stalls and are ashamed to go to the pit, and in dozens of other
ways enslaving ourselves when there are comfortable alternatives open
to us without any real drawbacks. The contemplation of these petty
slaveries, and of the triumphant ease with which sensible people throw
them off, creates an impression that if we only take Johnson's advice
to free our minds from cant, we can achieve freedom. But if we all
freed our minds from cant we should find that for the most part we
should have to go on doing the necessary work of the world exactly
as we did it before until we organized new and free methods of doing
it. Many people believed in secondary co-education (boys and girls
taught together) before schools like Bedales were founded: indeed
the practice was common enough in elementary schools and in Scotland;
but their belief did not help them until Bedales and St George's were
organized; and there are still not nearly enough co-educational schools
in existence to accommodate all the children of the parents who believe
in co-education up to university age, even if they could always afford
the fees of these exceptional schools. It may be edifying to tell
a duke that our public schools are all wrong in their constitution
and methods, or a costermonger that children should be treated as
in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister instead of as they are treated at the
elementary school at the corner of his street; but what are the duke
and the coster to do? Neither of them has any effective choice in
the matter: their children must either go to the schools that are,
or to no school at all. And as the duke thinks with reason that his
son will be a lout or a milksop or a prig if he does not go to school,
and the coster knows that his son will become an illiterate hooligan
if he is left to the streets, there is no real alternative for either
of them. Child life must be socially organized: no parent, rich or
poor, can choose institutions that do not exist; and the private enterprise
of individual school masters appealing to a group of well-to-do parents,
though it may shew what can be done by enthusiasts with new methods,
cannot touch the mass of our children. For the average parent or child
nothing is really available except the established practice; and this
is what makes it so important that the established practice should
be a sound one, and so useless for clever individuals to disparage
it unless they can organize an alternative practice and make it, too,
general.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright The Pursuit of Manners}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{The Pursuit of Manners}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{The Pursuit of Manners}

If you cross-examine the duke and the coster, you will find that they
are not concerned for the scholastic attainments of their children.
Ask the duke whether he could pass the standard examination of twelve-year-old
children in elementary schools, and he will admit, with an entirely
placid smile, that he would almost certainly be ignominiously plucked.
And he is so little ashamed of or disadvantaged by his condition that
he is not prepared to spend an hour in remedying it. The coster may
resent the inquiry instead of being amused by it; but his answer,
if true, will be the same. What they both want for their children
is the communal training, the apprenticeship to society, the lessons
in holding one's own among people of all sorts with whom one is not,
as in the home, on privileged terms. These can be acquired only by
{}``mixing with the world,'' no matter how wicked the world is.
No parent cares twopence whether his children can write Latin hexameters
or repeat the dates of the accession of all the English monarchs since
the Conqueror; but all parents are earnestly anxious about the manners
of their children. Better Claude Duval than Kaspar Hauser. Laborers
who are contemptuously anti-clerical in their opinions will send their
daughters to the convent school because the nuns teach them some sort
of gentleness of speech and behavior. And peers who tell you that
our public schools are rotten through and through, and that our Universities
ought to be razed to the foundations, send their sons to Eton and
Oxford, Harrow and Cambridge, not only because there is nothing else
to be done, but because these places, though they turn out blackguards
and ignoramuses and boobies galore, turn them out with the habits
and manners of the society they belong to. Bad as those manners are
in many respects, they are better than no manners at all. And no individual
or family can possibly teach them. They can be acquired only by living
in an organized community in which they are traditional.

Thus we see that there are reasons for the segregation of children
even in families where the great reason: namely, that children are
nuisances to adults, does not press very hardly, as, for instance,
in the houses of the very poor, who can send their children to play
in the streets, or the houses of the very rich, which are so large
that the children's quarters can be kept out of the parents' way like
the servants' quarters.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Not too much Wind on the Heath, Brother}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Not too much Wind on the Heath}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Not too much Wind on
the Heath, Brother}

What, then, is to be done? For the present, unfortunately, little
except propagating the conception of Children's Rights. Only the achievement
of economic equality through Socialism can make it possible to deal
thoroughly with the question from the point of view of the total interest
of the community, which must always consist of grown-up children.
Yet economic equality, like all simple and obvious arrangements, seems
impossible to people brought up as children are now. Still, something
can be done even within class limits. Large communities of children
of the same class are possible today; and voluntary organization of
outdoor life for children has already begun in Boy Scouting and excursions
of one kind or another. The discovery that anything, even school life,
is better for the child than home life, will become an over-ridden
hobby; and we shall presently be told by our faddists that anything,
even camp life, is better than school life. Some blundering beginnings
of this are already perceptible. There is a movement for making our
British children into priggish little barefooted vagabonds, all talking
like that born fool George Borrow, and supposed to be splendidly healthy
because they would die if they slept in rooms with the windows shut,
or perhaps even with a roof over their heads. Still, this is a fairly
healthy folly; and it may do something to establish Mr Harold Cox's
claim of a Right to Roam as the basis of a much needed law compelling
proprietors of land to provide plenty of gates in their fences, and
to leave them unlocked when there are no growing crops to be damaged
nor bulls to be encountered, instead of, as at present, imprisoning
the human race in dusty or muddy thoroughfares between walls of barbed
wire.

The reaction against vagabondage will come from the children themselves.
For them freedom will not mean the expensive kind of savagery now
called {}``the simple life.'' Their natural disgust with the visions
of cockney book fanciers blowing themselves out with {}``the wind
on the heath, brother,'' and of anarchists who are either too weak
to understand that men are strong and free in proportion to the social
pressure they can stand and the complexity of the obligations they
are prepared to undertake, or too strong to realize that what is freedom
to them may be terror and bewilderment to others, will drive them
back to the home and the school if these have meanwhile learned the
lesson that children are independent human beings and have rights.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Wanted: a Child's Magna Charta}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Wanted: a Child's Magna Charta}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Wanted: a Childs Magna
Charta}

Whether we shall presently be discussing a Juvenile Magna Charta or
Declaration of Rights by way of including children in the Constitution
is a question on which I leave others to speculate. But if it could
once be established that a child has an adult's Right of Egress from
uncomfortable places and unpleasant company, and there were children's
lawyers to \textit{\emph{sue}} \textit{\emph{pedagogues}} and others
for assault and imprisonment, there would be an amazing change in
the behavior of schoolmasters, the quality of school books, and the
amenities of school life. That Consciousness of Consent which, even
in its present delusive form, has enabled Democracy to oust tyrannical
systems in spite of all its vulgarities and stupidities and rancors
and ineptitudes and \textit{\emph{ignorances}}, would operate as powerfully
among children as it does now among grown-ups. No doubt the pedagogue
would promptly turn demagogue, and woo his scholars by all the arts
of demagogy; but none of these arts can easily be so dishonorable
or mischievous as the art of caning. And, after all, if larger liberties
are attached to the acquisition of knowledge, and the child finds
that it can no more go to the seaside without a knowledge of the multiplication
and pence tables than it can be an astronomer without mathematics,
it will learn the multiplication table, which is more than it always
does at present, in spite of all the canings and keepings in.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright The Pursuit of Learning}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{The Pursuit of Learning}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{The Pursuit of Learning}

When the Pursuit of Learning comes to mean the pursuit of learning
by the child instead of the pursuit of the child by Learning, cane
in hand, the danger will be precocity of the intellect, which is just
as undesirable as precocity of the emotions. We still have a silly
habit of talking and thinking as if intellect were a mechanical process
and not a passion; and in spite of the German tutors who confess openly
that three out of every five of the young men they coach for examinations
are lamed for life thereby; in spite of Dickens and his picture of
little Paul Dombey dying of lessons, we persist in heaping on growing
children and adolescent youths and maidens tasks Pythagoras would
have declined out of common regard for his own health and common modesty
as to his own capacity. And this overwork is not all the effect of
compulsion; for the average schoolmaster does not compel his scholars
to learn: he only scolds and punishes them if they do not, which is
quite a different thing, the net effect being that the school prisoners
need not learn unless they like. Nay, it is sometimes remarked that
the school dunce---meaning the one who does not like---often turns
out well afterwards, as if idleness were a sign of ability and character.
A much more sensible explanation is that the so-called dunces are
not exhausted before they begin the serious business of 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 unfortunately encouraged
thoughtlessly in this very dangerous and overstraining aspiration.
All the people who have really worked (Herbert Spencer for instance)
warn us against work as earnestly as some people warn us against drink.
When learning is placed on the voluntary footing of sport, the teacher
will find himself saying every day {}``Run away and play: you have
worked as much as is good for you.'' Trying to make children leave
school will be like trying to make them go to bed; and it will be
necessary to surprise them with the idea that teaching is work, and
that the teacher is tired and must go play or rest or eat: possibilities
always concealed by that infamous humbug the current schoolmaster,
who achieves a spurious divinity and a witch doctor's authority by
persuading children that he is not human, just as ladies persuade
them that they have no legs.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Children and Game: a Proposal}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Children and Game: a Proposal}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Children and Game: a
Proposal}

Of the many wild absurdities of our existing social order perhaps
the most grotesque is the costly and strictly enforced reservation
of large tracts of country as deer forests and breeding grounds for
pheasants whilst there is so little provision of the kind made for
children. I have more than once thought of trying to introduce the
shooting of children as a sport, as the children would then be preserved
very carefully for ten months in the year, thereby reducing their
death rate far more than the fusillades of the sportsmen during the
other two would raise it. At present the killing of a fox except by
a pack of foxhounds is regarded with horror; but you may and do kill
children in a hundred and fifty ways provided you do not shoot them
or set a pack of dogs on them. It must be admitted that the foxes
have the best of it; and indeed a glance at our pheasants, our deer,
and our children will convince the most sceptical that the children
have decidedly the worst of it.

This much hope, however, can be extracted from the present state of
things. It is so fantastic, so mad, so apparently impossible, that
no scheme of reform need ever henceforth be discredited on the ground
that it is fantastic or mad or apparently impossible. It is the sensible
schemes, unfortunately, that are hopeless in England. Therefore I
have great hopes that my own views, though fundamentally sensible,
can be made to appear fantastic enough to have a chance.

First, then, I lay it down as a prime condition of sane society, obvious
as such to anyone but an idiot, that in any decent community, children
should find in every part of their native country, food, clothing,
lodging, instruction, and parental kindness for the asking. For the
matter of that, so should adults; but the two cases differ in that
as these commodities do not grow on the bushes, the adults cannot
have them unless they themselves organize and provide the supply,
whereas the children must have them as if by magic, with nothing to
do but rub the lamp, like Aladdin, and have their needs satisfied.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright The Parents' Intolerable Burden}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{The Parents' Intolerable Burden}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{The Parents Intolerable
Burden}

There is nothing new in this: it is how children have always had and
must always have their needs satisfied. The parent has to play the
part of Aladdin's \textit{djinn}; and many a parent has sunk beneath
the burden of this service. All the novelty we need is to organize
it so that instead of the individual child fastening like a parasite
on its own particular parents, the whole body of children should be
thrown not only upon the whole body of parents, but upon the celibates
and childless as well, whose present exemption from a full share in
the social burden of children is obviously unjust and unwholesome.
Today it is easy to find a widow who has at great cost to herself
in pain, danger, and disablement, borne six or eight children. In
the same town you will find rich bachelors and old maids, and married
couples with no children or with families voluntarily limited to two
or three. The eight children do not belong to the woman in any real
or legal sense. When she has reared them they pass away from her into
the community as independent persons, marrying strangers, working
for strangers, spending on the community the life that has been built
up at her expense. No more monstrous injustice could be imagined than
that the burden of rearing the children should fall on her alone and
not on the celibates and the selfish as well.

This is so far recognized that already the child finds, wherever it
goes, a school for it, and somebody to force it into the school; and
more and more these schools are being driven by the mere logic of
facts to provide the children with meals, with boots, with spectacles,
with dentists and doctors. In fact, when the child's parents are destitute
or not to be found, bread, lodging, and clothing are provided. It
is true that they are provided grudgingly and on conditions infamous
enough to draw down abundant fire from Heaven upon us every day in
the shape of crime and disease and vice; but still the practice of
keeping children barely alive at the charge of the community is established;
and there is no need for me to argue about it. I propose only two
extensions of the practice. One is to provide for all the child's
reasonable human wants, on which point, if you differ from me, I shall
take leave to say that you are socially a fool and personally an inhuman
wretch. The other is that these wants should be supplied in complete
freedom from compulsory schooling or compulsory anything except restraint
from crime, though, as they can be supplied only by social organization,
the child must be conscious of and subject to the conditions of that
organization, which may involve such portions of adult responsibility
and duty as a child may be able to bear according to its age, and
which will in any case prevent it from forming the vagabond and anarchist
habit of mind.

One more exception might be necessary: compulsory freedom. I am sure
that a child should not be imprisoned in a school. I am not so sure
that it should not sometimes be driven out into the open---imprisoned
in the woods and on the mountains, as it were. For there are frowsty
children, just as there are frowsty adults, who \textit{dont} want
freedom. This morbid result of over-domestication would, let us hope,
soon disappear with its cause.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Mobilization}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Mobilization}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Mobilization}

Those who see no prospect held out to them by this except a country
in which all the children shall be roaming savages, should consider,
first, whether their condition would be any worse than that of the
little caged savages of today, and second, whether either children
or adults are so apt to run wild that it is necessary to tether them
fast to one neighborhood to prevent a general dissolution of society.
My own observation leads me to believe that we are not half mobilized
enough. True, I cannot deny that we are more mobile than we were.
You will still find in the home counties old men who have never been
to London, and who tell you that they once went to Winchester or St
Albans much as if they had been to the South Pole; but they are not
so common as the clerk who has been to Paris or to Lovely Lucerne,
and who {}``goes away somewhere'' when he has a holiday. His grandfather
never had a holiday, and, if he had, would no more have dreamed of
crossing the Channel than of taking a box at the Opera. But with all
allowance for the Polytechnic excursion and the tourist agency, our
inertia is still appalling. I confess to having once spent nine years
in London without putting my nose outside it; and though this was
better, perhaps, than the restless globe-trotting vagabondage of the
idle rich, wandering from hotel to hotel and never really living anywhere,
yet I should no more have done it if I had been properly mobilized
in my childhood than I should have worn the same suit of clothes all
that time (which, by the way, I very nearly did, my professional income
not having as yet begun to sprout). There are masses of people who
could afford at least a trip to Margate, and a good many who could
afford a trip round the world, who are more immovable than Aldgate
pump. To others, who would move if they knew how, travelling is surrounded
with imaginary difficulties and terrors. In short, the difficulty
is not to fix people, but to root them up. We keep repeating the silly
proverb that a rolling stone gathers no moss, as if moss were a desirable
parasite. What we mean is that a vagabond does not prosper. Even this
is not true, if prosperity means enjoyment as well as responsibility
and money. The real misery of vagabondage is the misery of having
nothing to do and nowhere to go, the misery of being derelict of God
and Man, the misery of the idle, poor or rich. And this is one of
the miseries of unoccupied childhood. The unoccupied adult, thus afflicted,
tries many distractions which are, to say the least, unsuited to children.
But one of them, the distraction of seeing the world, is innocent
and beneficial. Also it is childish, being a continuation of what
nurses call {}``taking notice,'' by which a child becomes experienced.
It is pitiable nowadays to see men and women doing after the age of
45 all the travelling and sightseeing they should have done before
they were 15. Mere wondering and staring at things is an important
part of a child's education: that is why children can be thoroughly
mobilized without making vagabonds of them. A vagabond is at home
nowhere because he wanders: a child should wander because it ought
to be at home everywhere. And if it has its papers and its passports,
and gets what it requires not by begging and pilfering, but from responsible
agents of the community as of right, and with some formal acknowledgment
of the obligations it is incurring and a knowledge of the fact that
these obligations are being recorded: if, further, certain qualifications
are exacted before it is promoted from permission to go as far as
its legs will carry it to using mechanical aids to locomotion, it
can roam without much danger of gypsification.

Under such circumstances the boy or girl could always run away, and
never be lost; and on no other conditions can a child be free without
being also a homeless outcast.

Parents could also run away from disagreeable children or drive them
out of doors or even drop their acquaintance, temporarily or permanently,
without inhumanity. Thus both parties would be on their good behavior,
and not, as at present, on their filial or parental behavior, which,
like all unfree behavior, is mostly bad behavior.

As to what other results might follow, we had better wait and see;
for nobody now alive can imagine what customs and institutions would
grow up in societies of free children. Child laws and child fashions,
child manners and child morals are now not tolerated; but among free
children there would certainly be surprising developments in this
direction. I do not think there would be any danger of free children
behaving as badly as grown-up people do now because they have never
been free. They could hardly behave worse, anyhow.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Children's Rights and Parents' Wrongs}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Children's Rights and Parents' Wrongs}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Childrens Rights and
Parents Wrongs}

A very distinguished man once assured a mother of my acquaintance
that she would never know what it meant to be hurt until she was hurt
through her children. Children are extremely cruel without intending
it; and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the reason is that they
do not conceive their elders as having any human feelings. Serve the
elders right, perhaps, for posing as superhuman! The penalty of the
impostor is not that he is found out (he very seldom is) but that
he is taken for what he pretends to be, and treated as such. And to
be treated as anything but what you really are may seem pleasant to
the imagination when the treatment is above your merits; but in actual
experience it is often quite the reverse. When I was a very small
boy, my romantic imagination, stimulated by early doses of fiction,
led me to brag to a still smaller boy so outrageously that he, being
a simple soul, really believed me to be an invincible hero. I cannot
remember whether this pleased me much; but I do remember very distinctly
that one day this admirer of mine, who had a pet goat, found the animal
in the hands of a larger boy than either of us, who mocked him and
refused to restore the animal to his rightful owner. Whereupon, naturally,
he came weeping to me, and demanded that I should rescue the goat
and annihilate the aggressor. My terror was beyond description: fortunately
for me, it imparted such a ghastliness to my voice and aspect as I
under the eye of my poor little dupe, advanced on the enemy with that
hideous extremity of cowardice which is called the courage of despair,
and said {}``You let go that goat,'' that he abandoned his prey
and fled, to my unforgettable, unspeakable relief. I have never since
exaggerated my prowess in bodily combat.

Now what happened to me in the adventure of the goat happens very
often to parents, and would happen to schoolmasters if the prison
door of the school did not shut out the trials of life. I remember
once, at school, the resident head master was brought down to earth
by the sudden illness of his wife. In the confusion that ensued it
became necessary to leave one of the schoolrooms without a master.
I was in the class that occupied that schoolroom. To have sent us
home would have been to break the fundamental bargain with our parents
by which the school was bound to keep us out of their way for half
the day at all hazards. Therefore an appeal had to be made to our
better feelings: that is, to our common humanity, not to make a noise.
But the head master had never admitted any common humanity with us.
We had been carefully broken in to regard him as a being quite aloof
from and above us: one not subject to error or suffering or death
or illness or mortality. Consequently sympathy was impossible; and
if the unfortunate lady did not perish, it was because, as I now comfort
myself with guessing, she was too much pre-occupied with her own pains,
and possibly making too much noise herself, to be conscious of the
pandemonium downstairs.

A great deal of the fiendishness of schoolboys and the cruelty of
children to their elders is produced just in this way. Elders cannot
be superhuman beings and suffering fellow-creatures at the same time.
If you pose as a little god, you must pose for better for worse.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright How Little We Know About Our Parents}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{How Little We Know About Our Parents}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{How Little We Know About
Our Parents}

The relation between parent and child has cruel moments for the parent
even when money is no object, and the material worries are delegated
to servants and school teachers. The child and the parent are strangers
to one another necessarily, because their ages must differ widely.
Read Goethe's autobiography; and note that though he was happy in
his parents and had exceptional powers of observation, divination,
and story-telling, he knew less about his father and mother than about
most of the other people he mentions. I myself was never on bad terms
with my mother: we lived together until I was forty-two years old,
absolutely without the smallest friction of any kind; yet when her
death set me thinking curiously about our relations, I realized that
I knew very little about her. Introduce me to a strange woman who
was a child when I was a child, a girl when I was a boy, an adolescent
when I was an adolescent; and if we take naturally to one another
I will know more of her and she of me at the end of forty days (I
had almost said of forty minutes) than I knew of my mother at the
end of forty years. A contemporary stranger is a novelty and an enigma,
also a possibility; but a mother is like a broomstick or like the
sun in the heavens, it does not matter which as far as one's knowledge
of her is concerned: the broomstick is there and the sun is there;
and whether the child is beaten by it or warmed and enlightened by
it, it accepts it as a fact in nature, and does not conceive it as
having had youth, passions, and weaknesses, or as still growing, yearning,
suffering, and learning. If I meet a widow I may ask her all about
her marriage; but what son ever dreams of asking his mother about
her marriage, or could endure to hear of it without violently breaking
off the old sacred relationship between them, and ceasing to be her
child or anything more to her than the first man in the street might
be?

Yet though in this sense the child cannot realize its parent's humanity,
the parent can realize the child's; for the parents with their experience
of life have none of the illusions about the child that the child
has about the parents; and the consequence is that the child can hurt
its parents' feelings much more than its parents can hurt the child's,
because the child, even when there has been none of the deliberate
hypocrisy by which children are taken advantage of by their elders,
cannot conceive the parent as a fellow-creature, whilst the parents
know very well that the children are only themselves over again. The
child cannot conceive that its blame or contempt or want of interest
could possibly hurt its parent, and therefore expresses them all with
an indifference which has given rise to the term \textit{enfant terrible}
(a tragic term in spite of the jests connected with it); whilst the
parent can suffer from such slights and reproaches more from a child
than from anyone else, even when the child is not beloved, because
the child is so unmistakably sincere in them.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Our Abandoned Mothers}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Our Abandoned Mothers}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Our Abandoned Mothers}

Take a very common instance of this agonizing incompatibility. A widow
brings up her son to manhood. He meets a strange woman, and goes off
with and marries her, leaving his mother desolate. It does not occur
to him that this is at all hard on her: he does it as a matter of
course, and actually expects his mother to receive, on terms of special
affection, the woman for whom she has been abandoned. If he shewed
any sense of what he was doing, any remorse; if he mingled his tears
with hers and asked her not to think too hardly of him because he
had obeyed the inevitable destiny of a man to leave his father and
mother and cleave to his wife, she could give him her blessing and
accept her bereavement with dignity and without reproach. But the
man never dreams of such considerations. To him his mother's feeling
in the matter, when she betrays it, is unreasonable, ridiculous, and
even odious, as shewing a prejudice against his adorable bride.

I have taken the widow as an extreme and obvious case; but there are
many husbands and wives who are tired of their consorts, or disappointed
in them, or estranged from them by infidelities; and these parents,
in losing a son or a daughter through marriage, may be losing everything
they care for. No parent's love is as innocent as the love of a child:
the exclusion of all conscious sexual feeling from it does not exclude
the bitterness, jealousy, and despair at loss which characterize sexual
passion: in fact, what is called a pure love may easily be more selfish
and jealous than a carnal one. Anyhow, it is plain matter of fact
that naively selfish people sometimes try with fierce jealousy to
prevent their children marrying.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Family Affection}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Family Affection}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Family Affection}

Until the family as we know it ceases to exist, nobody will dare to
analyze parental affection as distinguished from that general human
sympathy which has secured to many an orphan fonder care in a stranger's
house than it would have received from its actual parents. Not even
Tolstoy, in The Kreutzer Sonata, has said all that we suspect about
it. When it persists beyond the period at which it ceases to be necessary
to the child's welfare, it is apt to be morbid; and we are probably
wrong to inculcate its deliberate cultivation. The natural course
is for the parents and children to cast off the specific parental
and filial relation when they are no longer necessary to one another.
The child does this readily enough to form fresh ties, closer and
more fascinating. Parents are not always excluded from such compensations:
it happens sometimes that when the children go out at the door the
lover comes in at the window. Indeed it happens now oftener than it
used to, because people remain much longer in the sexual arena. The
cultivated Jewess no longer cuts off her hair at her marriage. The
British matron has discarded her cap and her conscientious ugliness;
and a bishop's wife at fifty has more of the air of a \textit{femme
galante} than an actress had at thirty-five in her grandmother's time.
But as people marry later, the facts of age and time still inexorably
condemn most parents to comparative solitude when their children marry.
This may be a privation and may be a relief: probably in healthy circumstances
it is no worse than a salutary change of habit; but even at that it
is, for the moment at least, a wrench. For though parents and children
sometimes dislike one another, there is an experience of succor and
a habit of dependence and expectation formed in infancy which naturally
attaches a child to its parent or to its nurse (a foster parent) in
a quite peculiar way. A benefit to the child may be a burden to the
parent; but people become attached to their burdens sometimes more
than the burdens are attached to them; and to {}``suffer little children''
has become an affectionate impulse deep in our nature.

Now there is no such impulse to suffer our sisters and brothers, our
aunts and uncles, much less our cousins. If we could choose our relatives,
we might, by selecting congenial ones, mitigate the repulsive effect
of the obligation to like them and to admit them to our intimacy.
But to have a person imposed on us as a brother merely because he
happens to have the same parents is unbearable when, as may easily
happen, he is the sort of person we should carefully avoid if he were
anyone else's brother. All Europe (except Scotland, which has clans
instead of families) draws the line at second cousins. Protestantism
draws it still closer by making the first cousin a marriageable stranger;
and the only reason for not drawing it at sisters and brothers is
that the institution of the family compels us to spend our childhood
with them, and thus imposes on us a curious relation in which familiarity
destroys romantic charm, and is yet expected to create a specially
warm affection. Such a relation is dangerously factitious and unnatural;
and the practical moral is that the less said at home about specific
family affection the better. Children, like grown-up people, get on
well enough together if they are not pushed down one another's throats;
and grown-up relatives will get on together in proportion to their
separation and their care not to presume on their blood relationship.
We should let children's feelings take their natural course without
prompting. I have seen a child scolded and called unfeeling because
it did not occur to it to make a theatrical demonstration of affectionate
delight when its mother returned after an absence: a typical example
of the way in which spurious family sentiment is stoked up. We are,
after all, sociable animals; and if we are let alone in the matter
of our affections, and well brought up otherwise, we shall not get
on any the worse with particular people because they happen to be
our brothers and sisters and cousins. The danger lies in assuming
that we shall get on any better.

The main point to grasp here is that families are not kept together
at present by family feeling but by human feeling. The family cultivates
sympathy and mutual help and consolation as any other form of kindly
association cultivates them; but the addition of a dictated compulsory
affection as an attribute of near kinship is not only unnecessary,
but positively detrimental; and the alleged tendency of modern social
development to break up the family need alarm nobody. We cannot break
up the facts of kinship nor eradicate its natural emotional consequences.
What we can do and ought to do is to set people free to behave naturally
and to change their behavior as circumstances change. To impose on
a citizen of London the family duties of a Highland cateran in the
eighteenth century is as absurd as to compel him to carry a claymore
and target instead of an umbrella. The civilized man has no special
use for cousins; and he may presently find that he has no special
use for brothers and sisters. The parent seems likely to remain indispensable;
but there is no reason why that natural tie should be made the excuse
for unnatural aggravations of it, as crushing to the parent as they
are oppressive to the child. The mother and father will not always
have to shoulder the burthen of maintenance which should fall on the
Atlas shoulders of the fatherland and motherland. Pending such reforms
and \textit{\emph{emancipations}}, a shattering break-up of the parental
home must remain one 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 be a mother but not to be a mother-in-law;
and if men were cut off artificially from intellectual and public
interests as women are, the father-in-law would be as deplorable a
figure in popular tradition as the mother-in-law.

It is not to be wondered at that some people hold that blood relationship
should be kept a secret from the persons related, and that the happiest
condition in this respect is that of the foundling who, if he ever
meets his parents or brothers or sisters, passes them by without knowing
them. And for such a view there is this to be said: that our family
system does unquestionably take the natural bond between members of
the same family, which, like all natural bonds, is not too tight to
be borne, and superimposes on it a painful burden of forced, inculcated,
suggested, and altogether unnecessary affection and responsibility
which we should do well to get rid of by making relatives as independent
of one another as possible.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright The Fate of the Family}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{The Fate of the Family}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{The Fate of the Family}

The difficulty of inducing people to talk sensibly about the family
is the same as that which I pointed out in a previous volume as confusing
discussions of marriage. Marriage is not a single invariable institution:
it changes from civilization to civilization, from religion to religion,
from civil code to civil code, from frontier to frontier. The family
is still more variable, because the number of persons constituting
a family, unlike the number of persons constituting a marriage, varies
from one to twenty: indeed, when a widower with a family marries a
widow with a family, and the two produce a third family, even that
very high number may be surpassed. And the conditions may vary between
opposite extremes: for example, in a London or Paris slum every child
adds to the burden of poverty and helps to starve the parents and
all the other children, whereas in a settlement of pioneer colonists
every child, from the moment it is big enough to lend a hand to the
family industry, is an investment in which the only danger is that
of temporary over-capitalization. Then there are the variations in
family sentiment. Sometimes the family organization is as frankly
political as the organization of an army or an industry: fathers being
no more expected to be sentimental about their children than colonels
about soldiers, or factory owners about their employees, though the
mother may be allowed a little tenderness if her character is weak.
The Roman father was a despot: the Chinese father is an object of
worship: the sentimental modern western father is often a play-fellow
looked to for toys and pocket-money. The farmer sees his children
constantly: the squire sees them only during the holidays, and not
then oftener than he can help: the tram conductor, when employed by
a joint stock company, sometimes never sees them at all.

Under such circumstances phrases like The Influence of Home Life,
The Family, The Domestic Hearth, and so on, are no more specific than
The Mammals, or The Man In The Street; and the pious generalizations
founded so glibly on them by our sentimental moralists are unworkable.
When households average twelve persons with the sexes about equally
represented, the results may be fairly good. When they average three
the results may be very bad indeed; and to lump the two together under
the general term The Family is to confuse the question hopelessly.
The modern small family is much too stuffy: children {}``brought
up at home'' in it are unfit for society. But here again circumstances
differ. If the parents live in what is called a garden suburb, where
there is a good deal of social intercourse, and the family, instead
of keeping itself to itself, as the evil old saying is, and glowering
at the neighbors over the blinds of the long street in which nobody
knows his neighbor and everyone wishes to deceive him as to his income
and social importance, is in effect broken up by school life, by out-of-door
habits, and by frank neighborly intercourse through dances and concerts
and theatricals and excursions and the like, families of four may
turn out much less barbarous citizens than families of ten which attain
the Boer ideal of being out of sight of one another's chimney smoke.

All one can say is, roughly, that the homelier the home, and the more
familiar the family, the worse for everybody concerned. The family
ideal is a humbug and a nuisance: one might as reasonably talk of
the barrack ideal, or the forecastle ideal, or any other substitution
of the machinery of social organization for the end of it, which must
always be the fullest and most capable life: in short, the most godly
life. And this significant word reminds us that though the popular
conception of heaven includes a Holy Family, it does not attach to
that family the notion of a separate home, or a private nursery or
kitchen or mother-in-law, or anything that constitutes the family
as we know it. Even blood relationship is miraculously abstracted
from it; and the Father is the father of all children, the mother
the mother of all mothers and babies, and the Son the Son of Man and
the Savior of his brothers: one whose chief utterance on the subject
of the conventional family was an invitation to all of us to leave
our families and follow him, and to leave the dead to bury the dead,
and not debauch ourselves at that gloomy festival the family funeral,
with its sequel of hideous mourning and grief which is either affected
or morbid.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Family Mourning}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Family Mourning}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Family Mourning}

I do not know how far this detestable custom of mourning is carried
in France; but judging from the appearance of the French people I
should say that a Frenchwoman goes into mourning for her cousins to
the seventeenth degree. The result is that when I cross the Channel
I seem to have reached a country devastated by war or pestilence.
It is really suffering only from the family. Will anyone pretend that
England has not the best of this striking difference? Yet it is such
senseless and unnatural conventions as this that make us so impatient
of what we call family feeling. Even apart from its insufferable pretensions,
the family needs hearty discrediting; for there is hardly any vulnerable
part of it that could not be amputated with advantage.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Art Teaching}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Art Teaching}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Art Teaching}

By art teaching I hasten to say that I do not mean giving children
lessons in freehand drawing and perspective. I am simply calling attention
to the fact that fine art is the only teacher except torture. I have
already pointed out that nobody, except under threat of torture, can
read a school book. The reason is that a school book is not a work
of art. Similarly, you cannot listen to a lesson or a sermon unless
the teacher or the preacher is an artist. You cannot read the Bible
if you have no sense of literary art. The reason why the continental
European is, to the Englishman or American, so surprisingly ignorant
of the Bible, is that the authorized English version is a great work
of literary art, and the continental versions are comparatively artless.
To read a dull book; to listen to a tedious play or prosy sermon or
lecture; to stare at uninteresting pictures or ugly buildings: nothing,
short of disease, is more dreadful than this. The violence done to
our souls by it leaves injuries and produces subtle maladies which
have never been properly studied by psycho-pathologists. Yet we are
so inured to it in school, where practically all the teachers are
bores trying to do the work of artists, and all the books artless,
that we acquire a truly frightful power of enduring boredom. We even
acquire the notion that fine art is lascivious and destructive to
the character. In church, in the House of Commons, at public meetings,
we sit solemnly listening to bores and twaddlers because from the
time we could walk or speak we have been snubbed, scolded, bullied,
beaten and imprisoned whenever we dared to resent being bored or twaddled
at, or to express our natural impatience and derision of bores and
twaddlers. And when a man arises with a soul of sufficient native
strength to break the bonds of this inculcated reverence and to expose
and deride and tweak the noses of our humbugs and panjandrums, like
Voltaire or Dickens, we are shocked and scandalized, even when we
cannot help laughing. Worse, we dread and persecute those who can
see and declare the truth, because their sincerity and insight reflects
on our delusion and blindness. We are all like Nell Gwynne's footman,
who defended Nell's reputation with his fists, not because he believed
her to be what he called an honest woman, but because he objected
to be scorned as the footman of one who was no better than she should
be.

This wretched power of allowing ourselves to be bored may seem to
give the fine arts a chance sometimes. People will sit through a performance
of Beethoven's ninth symphony or of Wagner's Ring just as they will
sit through a dull sermon or a front bench politician saying nothing
for two hours whilst his unfortunate country is perishing through
the delay of its business in Parliament. But their endurance is very
bad for the ninth symphony, because they never hiss when it is murdered.
I have heard an Italian conductor (no longer living) take the \textit{adagio}
of that symphony at a lively \textit{allegretto}, slowing down for
the warmer major sections into the speed and manner of the heroine's
death song in a Verdi opera; and the listeners, far from relieving
my excruciation by rising with yells of fury and hurling their programs
and opera glasses at the miscreant, behaved just as they do when Richter
conducts it. The mass of imposture that thrives on this combination
of ignorance with despairing endurance is incalculable. Given a public
trained from childhood to stand anything tedious, and so saturated
with school discipline that even with the doors open and no schoolmasters
to stop them they will sit there helplessly until the end of the concert
or opera gives them leave to go home; and you will have in great capitals
hundreds of thousands of pounds spent every night in the season on
professedly artistic entertainments which have no other effect on
fine art than to exacerbate the hatred in which it is already secretly
held in England.

Fortunately, there are arts that cannot be cut off from the people
by bad performances. We can read books for ourselves; and we can play
a good deal of fine music for ourselves with the help of a \textit{pianola}.
Nothing stands between us and the actual handwork of the great masters
of painting except distance; and modern photographic methods of reproduction
are in some cases quite and in many nearly as effective in conveying
the artist's message as a modern edition of Shakespear's plays is
in conveying the message that first existed in his handwriting. The
reproduction of great feats of musical execution is already on the
way: the phonograph, for all its wheezing and snarling and braying,
is steadily improving in its manners; and what with this improvement
on the one hand, and on the other that blessed selective faculty which
enables us to ignore a good deal of disagreeable noise if there is
a thread of music in the middle of it (few critics of the phonograph
seem to be conscious of the very considerable mechanical noise set
up by choirs and orchestras) we have at last reached a point at which,
for example, a person living in an English village where the church
music is the only music, and that music is made by a few well-intentioned
ladies with the help of a harmonium, can hear masses by Palestrina
very passably executed, and can thereby be led to the discovery that
Jackson in F and Hymns Ancient and Modern are not perhaps the last
word of beauty and propriety in the praise of God.

In short, there is a vast body of art now within the reach of everybody.
The difficulty is that this art, which alone can educate us in grace
of body and soul, and which alone can make the history of the past
live for us or the hope of the future shine for us, which alone can
give delicacy and nobility to our crude lusts, which is the appointed
vehicle of inspiration and the method of the communion of saints,
is actually branded as sinful among us because, wherever it arises,
there is resistance to tyranny, breaking of fetters, and the breath
of freedom. The attempt to suppress art is not wholly successful:
we might as well try to suppress oxygen. But it is carried far enough
to inflict on huge numbers of people a most injurious art starvation,
and to corrupt a great deal of the art that is tolerated. You will
find in England plenty of rich families with little more culture than
their dogs and horses. And you will find poor families, cut off by
poverty and town life from the contemplation of the beauty of the
earth, with its dresses of leaves, its scarves of cloud, and its contours
of hill and valley, who would positively be happier as hogs, so little
have they cultivated their humanity by the only effective instrument
of culture: art. The dearth is artificially maintained even when there
are the means of satisfying it. Story books are forbidden, picture
post cards are forbidden, theatres are forbidden, operas are forbidden,
circuses are forbidden, sweetmeats are forbidden, pretty colors are
forbidden, all exactly as vice is forbidden. The Creator is explicitly
prayed to, and implicitly convicted of indecency every day. An association
of vice and sin with everything that is delightful and of goodness
with everything that is wretched and detestable is set up. All the
most perilous (and glorious) appetites and propensities are at once
inflamed by starvation and uneducated by art. All the wholesome conditions
which art imposes on appetite are waived: instead of cultivated men
and women restrained by a thousand delicacies, repelled by ugliness,
chilled by vulgarity, horrified by coarseness, deeply and sweetly
moved by the graces that art has revealed to them and nursed in them,
we get indiscrimmate rapacity in pursuit of pleasure and a parade
of the grossest stimulations in catering for it. We have a continual
clamor for goodness, beauty, virtue, and sanctity, with such an appalling
inability to recognize it or love it when it arrives that it is more
dangerous to be a great prophet or poet than to promote twenty companies
for swindling simple folk out of their savings. Do not for a moment
suppose that uncultivated people are merely indifferent to high and
noble qualities. They hate them malignantly. At best, such qualities
are like rare and beautiful birds: when they appear the whole country
takes down its guns; but the birds receive the statuary tribute of
having their corpses stuffed.

And it really all comes from the habit of preventing children from
being troublesome. You are so careful of your boy's morals, knowing
how troublesome they may be, that you keep him away from the Venus
of Milo only to find him in the arms of the scullery maid or someone
much worse. You decide that the Hermes of Praxiteles and Wagner's
Tristan are not suited for young girls; and your daughter marries
somebody appallingly unlike either Hermes or Tristan solely to escape
from your parental protection. You have not stifled a single passion
nor averted a single danger: you have depraved the passions by starving
them, and broken down all the defences which so effectively protect
children brought up in freedom. You have men who imagine themselves
to be ministers of religion openly declaring that when they pass through
the streets they have to keep out in the wheeled traffic to avoid
the temptations of the pavement. You have them organizing hunts of
the women who tempt them---poor creatures whom no artist would touch
without a shudder---and wildly clamoring for more clothes to disguise
and conceal the body, and for the abolition of pictures, statues,
theatres, and pretty colors. And incredible as it seems, these unhappy
lunatics are left at large, unrebuked, even admired and revered, whilst
artists have to struggle for toleration. To them an undraped human
body is the most monstrous, the most blighting, the most obscene,
the most unbearable spectacle in the universe. To an artist it is,
at its best, the most admirable spectacle in nature, and, at its average,
an object of indifference. If every rag of clothing miraculously dropped
from the inhabitants of London at noon tomorrow (say as a preliminary
to the Great Judgment), the artistic people would not turn a hair;
but the artless people would go mad and call on the mountains to hide
them. I submit that this indicates a thoroughly healthy state on the
part of the artists, and a thoroughly morbid one on the part of the
artless. And the healthy state is attainable in a cold country like
ours only by familiarity with the undraped figure acquired through
pictures, statues, and theatrical representations in which an illusion
of natural clotheslessness is produced and made poetic.

In short, we all grow up stupid and mad to just the extent to which
we have not been artistically educated; and the fact that this taint
of stupidity and madness has to be tolerated because it is general,
and is even boasted of as characteristically English, makes the situation
all the worse. It is becoming exceedingly grave at present, because
the last ray of art is being cut off from our schools by the discontinuance
of religious education.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright The Impossibility of Secular Education}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{The Impossibility of Secular Education}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{The Impossibility of
Secular Education}

Now children must be taught some sort of religion. Secular education
is an impossibility. Secular education comes to this: that the only
reason for ceasing to do evil and learning to do well is that if you
do not you will be caned. This is worse than being taught in a church
school that if you become a dissenter you will go to hell; for hell
is presented as the instrument of something eternal, divine, and inevitable:
you cannot evade it the moment the schoolmaster's back is turned.
What confuses this issue and leads even highly intelligent religious
persons to advocate secular education as a means of rescuing children
from the strife of rival proselytizers is the failure to distinguish
between the child's personal subjective need for a religion and its
right to an impartially communicated historical objective knowledge
of all the creeds and Churches. Just as a child, no matter what its
race and color may be, should know that there are black men and brown
men and yellow men, and, no matter what its political convictions
may be, that there are Monarchists and Republicans and Positivists,
Socialists and Unsocialists, so it should know that there are Christians
and Mahometans and Buddhists and Shintoists and so forth, and that
they are on the average just as honest and well-behaved as its own
father. For example, it should not be told that Allah is a false god
set up by the Turks and Arabs, who will all be damned for taking that
liberty; but it should be told that many English people think so,
and that many Turks and Arabs think the converse about English people.
It should be taught that Allah is simply the name by which God is
known to Turks and Arabs, who are just as eligible for salvation as
any Christian. Further, that the practical reason why a Turkish child
should pray in a mosque and an English child in a church is that as
worship is organized in Turkey in mosques in the name of Mahomet and
in England in churches in the name of Christ, a Turkish child joining
the Church of England or an English child following Mahomet will find
that it has no place for its worship and no organization of its religion
within its reach. Any other teaching of the history and present facts
of religion is false teaching, and is politically extremely dangerous
in an empire in which a huge majority of the fellow subjects of the
governing island do not profess the religion of that island.

But this objectivity, though intellectually honest, tells the child
only what other people believe. What it should itself believe is quite
another matter. The sort of Rationalism which says to a child {}``You
must suspend your judgment until you are old enough to choose your
religion'' is Rationalism gone mad. The child must have a conscience
and a code of honor (which is the essence of religion) even if it
be only a provisional one, to be revised at its confirmation. For
confirmation is meant to signalize a spiritual coming of age, and
may be a repudiation. Really active souls have many confirmations
and repudiations as their life deepens and their knowledge widens.
But what is to guide the child before its first confirmation? Not
mere orders, because orders must have a sanction of some sort or why
should the child obey them? If, as a Secularist, you refuse to teach
any sanction, you must say {}``You will be punished if you disobey.''
{}``Yes,'' says the child to itself, {}``if I am found out; but
wait until your back is turned and I will do as I like, and lie about
it.'' There can be no objective punishment for successful fraud;
and as no espionage can cover the whole range of a child's conduct,
the upshot is that the child becomes a liar and schemer with an atrophied
conscience. And a good many of the orders given to it are not obeyed
after all. Thus the Secularist who is not a fool is forced to appeal
to the child's vital impulse towards perfection, to the divine spark;
and no resolution not to call this impulse an impulse of loyalty to
the Fellowship of the Holy Ghost, or obedience to the Will of God,
or any other standard theological term, can alter the fact that the
Secularist has stepped outside Secularism and is educating the child
religiously, even if he insists on repudiating that pious adverb and
substituting the word metaphysically.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Natural Selection as a Religion}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Natural Selection as a Religion}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Natural Selection as
a Religion}

We must make up our minds to it therefore that whatever measures we
may be forced to take to prevent the recruiting sergeants of the Churches,
free or established, from obtaining an exclusive right of entry to
schools, we shall not be able to exclude religion from them. The most
horrible of all religions: that which teaches us to regard ourselves
as the helpless prey of a series of senseless accidents called Natural
Selection, is allowed and even welcomed in so-called secular schools
because it is, in a sense, the negation of all religion; but for school
purposes a religion is a belief which affects conduct; and no belief
affects conduct more radically and often so disastrously as the belief
that the universe is a product of Natural Selection. What is more,
the theory of Natural Selection cannot be kept out of schools, because
many of the natural facts that present the most plausible appearance
of design can be accounted for by Natural Selection; and it would
be so absurd to keep a child in delusive ignorance of so potent a
factor in evolution as to keep it in ignorance of radiation or capillary
attraction. Even if you make a religion of Natural Selection, and
teach the child to regard itself as the irresponsible prey of its
circumstances and appetites (or its heredity as you will perhaps call
them), you will none the less find that its appetites are stimulated
by your encouragement and daunted by your discouragement; that one
of its appetites is an appetite for perfection; that if you discourage
this appetite and encourage the cruder acquisitive appetites the child
will steal and lie and be a nuisance to you; and that if you encourage
its appetite for perfection and teach it to attach a peculiar sacredness
to it and place it before the other appetites, it will be a much nicer
child and you will have a much easier job, at which point you will,
in spite of your pseudoscientific jargon, find yourself back in the
old-fashioned religious teaching as deep as Dr.\ Watts and in fact
fathoms deeper.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Moral Instruction Leagues}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Moral Instruction Leagues}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Moral Instruction Leagues}

And now the voices of our Moral Instruction Leagues will be lifted,
asking whether there is any reason why the appetite for perfection
should not be cultivated in rationally scientific terms instead of
being associated with the story of Jonah and the great fish and the
thousand other tales that grow up round religions. Yes: there are
many reasons; and one of them is that children all like the story
of Jonah and the whale (they insist on its being a whale in spite
of demonstrations by Bible smashers without any sense of humor that
Jonah would not have fitted into a whale's gullet---as if the story
would be credible of a whale with an enlarged throat) and that no
child on earth can stand moral instruction books or catechisms or
any other statement of the case for religion in abstract terms. The
object of a moral instruction book is not to be rational, scientific,
exact, proof against controversy, nor even credible: its object is
to make children good; and if it makes them sick instead its place
is the waste-paper basket.

Take for an illustration the story of Elisha and the bears. To the
authors of the moral instruction books it is in the last degree reprehensible.
It is obviously not true as a record of fact; and the picture it gives
us of the temper of God (which is what interests an adult reader)
is shocking and blasphemous. But it is a capital story for a child.
It interests a child because it is about bears; and it leaves the
child with an impression that children who poke fun at old gentlemen
and make rude remarks about bald heads are not nice children, which
is a highly desirable impression, and just as much as a child is capable
of receiving from the story. When a story is about God and a child,
children take God for granted and criticize the child. Adults do the
opposite, and are thereby led to talk great nonsense about the bad
effect of Bible stories on infants.

But let no one think that a child or anyone else can learn religion
from a teacher or a book or by any academic process whatever. It is
only by an unfettered access to the whole body of Fine Art: that is,
to the whole body of inspired revelation, that we can build up that
conception of divinity to which all virtue is an aspiration. And to
hope to find this body of art purified from all that is obsolete or
dangerous or fierce or lusty, or to pick and choose what will be good
for any particular child, much less for all children, is the shallowest
of vanities. Such schoolmasterly selection is neither possible nor
desirable. Ignorance of evil is not virtue but imbecility: admiring
it is like giving a prize for honesty to a man who has not stolen
your watch because he did not know you had one. Virtue chooses good
from evil; and without knowledge there can be no choice. And even
this is a dangerous simplification of what actually occurs. We are
not choosing: we are growing. Were you to cut all of what you call
the evil out of a child, it would drop dead. If you try to stretch
it to full human stature when it is ten years old, you will simply
pull it into two pieces and be hanged. And when you try to do this
morally, which is what parents and schoolmasters are doing every day,
you ought to be hanged; and some day, when we take a sensible view
of the matter, you will be; and serve you right. The child does not
stand between a good and a bad angel: what it has to deal with is
a middling angel who, in normal healthy cases, wants to be a good
angel as fast as it can without killing itself in the process, which
is a dangerous one.

Therefore there is no question of providing the child with a carefully
regulated access to good art. There is no good art, any more than
there is good anything else in the absolute sense. Art that is too
good for the child will either teach it nothing or drive it mad, as
the Bible has driven many people mad who might have kept their sanity
had they been allowed to read much lower forms of literature. The
practical moral is that we must read whatever stories, see whatever
pictures, hear whatever songs and symphonies, go to whatever plays
we like. We shall not like those which have nothing to say to us;
and though everyone has a right to bias our choice, no one has a right
to deprive us of it by keeping us from any work of art or any work
of art from us.

I may now say without danger of being misunderstood that the popular
English compromise called Cowper Templeism (unsectarian Bible education)
is not so silly as it looks. It is true that the Bible inculcates
half a dozen religions: some of them barbarous; some cynical and pessimistic;
some amoristic and romantic; some sceptical and challenging; some
kindly, simple, and intuitional; some sophistical and intellectual;
none suited to the character and conditions of western civilization
unless it be the Christianity which was finally suppressed by the
Crucifixion, and has never been put into practice by any State before
or since. But the Bible contains the ancient literature of a very
remarkable Oriental race; and the imposition of this literature, on
whatever false pretences, on our children left them more literate
than if they knew no literature at all, which was the practical alternative.
And as our Authorized Version is a great work of art as well, to know
it was better than knowing no art, which also was the practical alternative.
It is at least not a school book; and it is not a bad story book,
horrible as some of the stories are. Therefore as between the Bible
and the blank represented by secular education, the choice is with
the Bible.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright The Bible}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{The Bible}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{The Bible}

But the Bible is not sufficient. The real Bible of modern Europe is
the whole body of great literature in which the inspiration and revelation
of Hebrew Scripture has been continued to the present day. Nietzsche's
Thus Spake Zoroaster is less comforting to the ill and unhappy than
the Psalms; but it is much truer, subtler, and more edifying. The
pleasure we get from the rhetoric of the book of Job and its tragic
picture of a bewildered soul cannot disguise the ignoble irrelevance
of the retort of God with which it closes, or supply the need of such
modern revelations as Shelley's Prometheus or The Niblung's Ring of
Richard Wagner. There is nothing in the Bible greater in inspiration
than Beethoven's ninth symphony; and the power of modern music to
convey that inspiration to a modern man is far greater than that of
Elizabethan English, which is, except for people steeped in the Bible
from childhood like Sir Walter Scott and Ruskin, a dead language.

Besides, many who have no ear for literature or for music are accessible
to architecture, to pictures, to statues, to dresses, and to the arts
of the stage. Every device of art should be brought to bear on the
young; so that they may discover some form of it that delights them
naturally; for there will come to all of them that period between
dawning adolescence and full maturity when the pleasures and emotions
of art will have to satisfy cravings which, if starved or insulted,
may become morbid and seek disgraceful satisfactions, and, if prematurely
gratified otherwise than poetically, may destroy the stamina of the
race. And it must be borne in mind that the most dangerous art for
this necessary purpose is the art that presents itself as religious
ecstasy. Young people are ripe for love long before they are ripe
for religion. Only a very foolish person would substitute the Imitation
of Christ for Treasure Island as a present for a boy or girl, or for
Byron's Don Juan as a present for a swain or lass. Pickwick is the
safest saint for us in our nonage. Flaubert's Temptation of St Anthony
is an excellent book for a man of fifty, perhaps the best within reach
as a healthy study of visionary ecstasy; but for the purposes of a
boy of fifteen Ivanhoe and the Templar make a much better saint and
devil. And the boy of fifteen will find this out for himself if he
is allowed to wander in a well-stocked literary garden, and hear bands
and see pictures and spend his pennies on cinematograph shows. His
choice may often be rather disgusting to his elders when they want
him to choose the best before he is ready for it. The greatest Protestant
Manifesto ever written, as far as I know, is Houston Chamberlain's
Foundations of the Nineteenth Century: everybody capable of it should
read it. Probably the History of Maria Monk is at the opposite extreme
of merit (this is a guess: I have never read it); but it is certain
that a boy let loose in a library would go for Maria Monk and have
no use whatever for Mr Chamberlain. I should probably have read Maria
Monk myself if I had not had the Arabian Nights and their like to
occupy me better. In art, children, like adults, will find their level
if they are left free to find it, and not restricted to what adults
think good for them. Just at present our young people are going mad
over ragtimes, apparently because syncopated rhythms are new to them.
If they had learnt what can be done with syncopation from Beethoven's
third Leonora overture, they would enjoy the ragtimes all the more;
but they would put them in their proper place as amusing vulgarities.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Artist Idolatry}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Artist Idolatry}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Artist Idolatry}

But there are more dangerous influences than ragtimes waiting for
people brought up in ignorance of fine art. Nothing is more pitiably
ridiculous than the wild worship of artists by those who have never
been seasoned in youth to the enchantments of art. Tenors and prima
donnas, pianists and violinists, actors and actresses enjoy powers
of seduction which in the middle ages would have exposed them to the
risk of being burnt for sorcery. But as they exercise this power by
singing, playing, and acting, no great harm is done except perhaps
to themselves. Far graver are the powers enjoyed by brilliant persons
who are also connoisseurs in art. The influence they can exercise
on young people who have been brought up in the darkness and wretchedness
of a home without art, and in whom a natural bent towards art has
always been baffled and snubbed, is incredible to those who have not
witnessed and understood it. He (or she) who reveals the world of
art to them opens heaven to them. They become satellites, disciples,
worshippers of the apostle. Now the apostle may be a voluptuary without
much conscience. Nature may have given him enough virtue to suffice
in a reasonable environment. But this allowance may not be enough
to defend him against the temptation and demoralization of finding
himself a little god on the strength of what ought to be a quite ordinary
culture. He may find adorers in all directions in our uncultivated
society among people of stronger character than himself, not one of
whom, if they had been artistically educated, would have had anything
to learn from him or regarded him as in any way extraordinary apart
from his actual achievements as an artist. Tartuffe is not always
a priest. Indeed he is not always a rascal: he is often a weak man
absurdly credited with omniscience and perfection, and taking unfair
advantages only because they are offered to him and he is too weak
to refuse. Give everyone his culture, and no one will offer him more
than his due.

In thus delivering our children from the idolatry of the artist, we
shall not destroy for them the enchantment of art: on the contrary,
we shall teach them to demand art everywhere as a condition attainable
by cultivating the body, mind, and heart. Art, said Morris, is the
expression of pleasure in work. And certainly, when work is made detestable
by slavery, there is no art. It is only when learning is made a slavery
by tyrannical teachers that art becomes loathsome to the pupil.

{}``The Machine''

When we set to work at a Constitution to secure freedom for children,
we had better bear in mind that the children may not be at all obliged
to us for our pains. Rousseau said that men are born free; and this
saying, in its proper bearings, was and is a great and true saying;
yet let it not lead us into the error of supposing that all men long
for freedom and embrace it when it is offered to them. On the contrary,
it has to be forced on them; and even then they will give it the slip
if it is not religiously inculcated and strongly safeguarded.

Besides, men are born docile, and must in the nature of things remain
so with regard to everything they do not understand. Now political
science and the art of govemment are among the things they do not
understand, and indeed are not at present allowed to understand. They
can be enslaved by a system, as we are at present, because it happens
to be there, and nobody understands it. An intelligently worked Capitalist
system, as Comte saw, would give us all that most of us are intelligent
enough to want. What makes it produce such unspeakably vile results
is that it is an automatic system which is as little understood by
those who profit by it in money as by those who are starved and degraded
by it: our millionaires and statesmen are manifestly no more {}``captains
of industry'' or scientific politicians than our bookmakers are mathematicians.
For some time past a significant word has been coming into use as
a substitute for Destiny, Fate, and Providence. It is {}``The Machine'':
the machine that has no god in it. Why do governments do nothing in
spite of reports of Royal Commissions that establish the most frightful
urgency? Why do our philanthropic millionaires do nothing, though
they are ready to throw bucketfuls of gold into the streets? The Machine
will not let them. Always the Machine. In short, they \textit{dont}
know how.

They try to reform Society as an old lady might try to restore a broken
down locomotive by prodding it with a knitting needle. And this is
not at all because they are born fools, but because they have been
educated, not into manhood and freedom, but into blindness and slavery
by their parents and schoolmasters, themselves the victims of a similar
misdirection, and consequently of The Machine. They do not want liberty.
They have not been educated to want it. They choose slavery and inequality;
and all the other evils are automatically added to them.

And yet we must have The Machine. It is only in unskilled hands under
ignorant direction that machinery is dangerous. We can no more govern
modern communities without political machinery than we can feed and
clothe them without industrial machinery. Shatter The Machine, and
you get Anarchy. And yet The Machine works so detestably at present
that we have people who advocate Anarchy and call themselves Anarchists.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright The Provocation to Anarchism}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{The Provocation to Anarchism}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{The Provocation to Anarchism}

What is valid in Anarchism is that all Governments try to simplify
their task by destroying liberty and glorifying authority in general
and their own deeds in particular. But the difficulty in combining
law and order with free institutions is not a natural one. It is a
matter of inculcation. If people are brought up to be slaves, it is
useless and dangerous to let them loose at the age of twenty-one and
say {}``Now you are free.'' No one with the tamed soul and broken
spirit of a slave can be free. It is like saying to a laborer brought
up on a family income of thirteen shillings a week, {}``Here is one
hundred thousand pounds: now you are wealthy.'' Nothing can make
such a man really wealthy. Freedom and wealth are difficult and responsible
conditions to which men must be accustomed and socially trained from
birth. A nation that is free at twenty-one is not free at all; just
as a man first enriched at fifty remains poor all his life, even if
he does not curtail it by drinking himself to death in the first wild
ecstasy of being able to swallow as much as he likes for the first
time. You cannot govern men brought up as slaves otherwise than as
slaves are governed. You may pile Bills of Right and Habeas Corpus
Acts on Great Charters; promulgate American Constitutions; burn the
\emph{chateaux} and guillotine the \textit{seigneurs}; chop off the
heads of kings and queens and set up Democracy on the ruins of feudalism:
the end of it all for us is that already in the twentieth century
there has been as much brute coercion and savage intolerance, as much
flogging and hanging, as much impudent injustice on the bench and
lustful rancor in the pulpit, as much na\"{\i}ve resort to torture,
persecution, and suppression of free speech and freedom of the press,
as much war, as much of the vilest excess of mutilation, rapine, and
delirious indiscriminate slaughter of helpless non-combatants, old
and young, as much prostitution of professional talent, literary and
political, in defence of manifest wrong, as much cowardly sycophancy
giving fine names to all this villainy or pretending that it is {}``greatly
exaggerated,'' as we can find any record of from the days when the
advocacy of liberty was a capital offence and Democracy was hardly
thinkable. Democracy exhibits the vanity of Louis XIV, the savagery
of Peter of Russia, the nepotism and provinciality of Napoleon, the
fickleness of Catherine II: in short, all the childishnesses of all
the despots without any of the qualities that enabled the greatest
of them to fascinate and dominate their contemporaries.

And the flatterers of Democracy are as impudently servile to the successful,
and insolent to common honest folk, as the flatterers of the monarchs.
Democracy in America has led to the withdrawal of ordinary refined
persons from politics; and the same result is coming in England as
fast as we make Democracy as democratic as it is in America. This
is true also of popular religion: it is so horribly irreligious that
nobody with the smallest pretence to culture, or the least inkling
of what the great prophets vainly tried to make the world understand,
will have anything to do with it except for purely secular reasons.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Imagination}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Imagination}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Imagination}

Before we can clearly understand how baleful is this condition of
intimidation in which we live, it is necessary to clear up the confusion
made by our use of the word imagination to denote two very different
powers of mind. One is the power to imagine things as they are not:
this I call the romantic imagination. The other is the power to imagine
things as they are without actually sensing them; and this I will
call the realistic imagination. Take for example marriage and war.
One man has a vision of perpetual bliss with a domestic angel at home,
and of flashing sabres, thundering guns, victorious cavalry charges,
and routed enemies in the field. That is romantic imagination; and
the mischief it does is incalculable. It begins in silly and selfish
expectations of the impossible, and ends in spiteful disappointment,
sour grievance, cynicism, and misanthropic resistance to any attempt
to better a hopeless world. The wise man knows that imagination is
not only a means of pleasing himself and beguiling tedious hours with
romances and fairy tales and fools' paradises (a quite defensible
and delightful amusement when you know exactly what you are doing
and where fancy ends and facts begin), but also a means of foreseeing
and being prepared for realities as yet unexperienced, and of testing
the possibility and desirability of serious Utopias. He does not expect
his wife to be an angel; nor does he overlook the facts that war depends
on the rousing of all the murderous blackguardism still latent in
mankind; that every victory means a defeat; that fatigue, hunger,
terror, and disease are the raw material which romancers work up into
military glory; and that soldiers for the most part go to war as children
go to school, because they are afraid not to. They are afraid even
to say they are afraid, as such candor is punishable by death in the
military code.

A very little realistic imagination gives an ambitious person enormous
power over the multitudinous victims of the romantic imagination.
For the romancer not only pleases himself with fictitious glories:
he also terrifies himself with imaginary dangers. He does not even
picture what these dangers are: he conceives the unknown as always
dangerous. When you say to a realist {}``You must do this'' or {}``You
must not do that,'' he instantly asks what will happen to him if
he does (or does not, as the case may be). Failing an unromantic convincing
answer, he does just as he pleases unless he can find for himself
a real reason for refraining. In short, though you can intimidate
him, you cannot bluff him. But you can always bluff the romantic person:
indeed his grasp of real considerations is so feeble that you find
it necessary to bluff him even when you have solid considerations
to offer him instead. The campaigns of Napoleon, with their atmosphere
of glory, illustrate this. In the Russian campaign Napoleon's marshals
achieved miracles of bluff, especially Ney, who, with a handful of
men, monstrously outnumbered, repeatedly kept the Russian troops paralyzed
with terror by pure bounce. Napoleon himself, much more a realist
than Ney (that was why he dominated him), would probably have surrendered;
for sometimes the bravest of the brave will achieve successes never
attempted by the cleverest of the clever. Wellington was a completer
realist than Napoleon. It was impossible to persuade Wellington that
he was beaten until he actually was beaten. He was unbluffable; and
if Napoleon had understood the nature of Wellington's strength instead
of returning Wellington's snobbish contempt for him by an academic
contempt for Wellington, he would not have left the attack at Waterloo
to Ney and D'Erlon, who, on that field, did not know when they were
beaten, whereas Wellington knew precisely when he was not beaten.
The unbluffable would have triumphed anyhow, probably, because Napoleon
was an academic soldier, doing the academic thing (the attack in columns
and so forth) with superlative ability and energy; whilst Wellington
was an original soldier who, instead of outdoing the terrible academic
columns with still more terrible and academic columns, outwitted them
with the thin red line, not of heroes, but, as this uncompromising
realist never hesitated to testify, of the scum of the earth.


\chapter*{\protect\raggedright Government by Bullies}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Government by Bullies}

\markboth{A Treatise on Parents and Children}{Government by Bullies}

These picturesque martial incidents are being reproduced every day
in our ordinary life. We are bluffed by hardy simpletons and headstrong
bounders as the Russians were bluffed by Ney; and our \textit{\emph{Wellingtons}}
are threadbound by slave-democracy as Gulliver was threadbound by
the Lilliputians. We are a mass of people living in a submissive routine
to which we have been drilled from our childhood. When you ask us
to take the simplest step outside that routine, we say shyly, {}``Oh,
I really couldnt,'' or {}``Oh, I shouldnt like to,'' without being
able to point out the smallest harm that could possibly ensue: victims,
not of a rational fear of real dangers, but of pure abstract fear,
the quintessence of cowardice, the very negation of {}``the fear
of God.'' Dotted about among us are a few spirits relatively free
from this inculcated paralysis, sometimes because they are half-witted,
sometimes because they are unscrupulously selfish, sometimes because
they are realists as to money and unimaginative as to other things,
sometimes even because they are exceptionally able, but always because
they are not afraid of shadows nor oppressed with nightmares. And
we see these few rising as if by magic into power and affluence, and
forming, with the millionaires who have accidentally gained huge riches
by the occasional windfalls of our commerce, the governing class.
Now nothing is more disastrous than a governing class that does not
know how to govern. And how can this rabble of the casual products
of luck, cunning, and folly, be expected to know how to govern? The
merely lucky ones and the hereditary ones do not owe their position
to their qualifications at all. As to the rest, the realism which
seems their essential qualification often consists not only in a lack
of romantic imagination, which lack is a merit, but of the realistic,
constructive, Utopian imagination, which lack is a ghastly defect.
Freedom from imaginative illusion is therefore no guarantee whatever
of nobility of character: that is why inculcated submissiveness makes
us slaves to people much worse than ourselves, and why it is so important
that submissiveness should no longer be inculcated.

And yet as long as you have the compulsory school as we know it, we
shall have submissiveness inculcated. What is more, until the active
hours of child life are organized separately from the active hours
of adult life, so that adults can enjoy the society of children in
reason without being tormented, disturbed, harried, burdened, and
hindered in their work by them as they would be now if there were
no compulsory schools and no children hypnotized into the belief that
they must tamely go to them and be imprisoned and beaten and over-tasked
in them, we shall have schools under one pretext or another; and we
shall have all the evil consequences and all the social hopelessness
that result from turning a nation of potential freemen and freewomen
into a nation of two-legged spoilt spaniels with everything crushed
out of their nature except dread of the whip. Liberty is the breath
of life to nations; and liberty is the one thing that parents, schoolmasters,
and rulers spend their lives in extirpating for the sake of an immediately
quiet and finally disastrous life. 
\end{document}
