Treatise On Parents And Children / George Bernard Shaw

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probably be superseded in half that time by an improved machine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.

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.

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.

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," "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 pedagogues, 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.

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 _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.

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.

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, etc. 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.

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 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.

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.

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 dont

understand and 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 _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.

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.

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 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 _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.

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.

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 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 one's 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.

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.

Children's 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,

etc. etc. 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.

Children's 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 precipices 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.

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.

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.

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 _he_ should be caned instead of being allowed to cane

other people.

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 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

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 dont 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, _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.

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, etc. etc. 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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

The Demagogue's 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: _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 _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.

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

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.

We Must Reform Society before we can Reform Ourselves

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.

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.

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.

Wanted: a Child's 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 sue 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

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.

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.

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.

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 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 dont want freedom.

This morbid result of over-domestication would, let us hope, soon

disappear with its cause.

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.

Children's 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.

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 _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.

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.

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 _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 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.

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.

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.

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 _adagio_ of that symphony at a lively _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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

chateaux and guillotine the 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 naive 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.

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.

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 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.