,a ,,treatise ,,on ,,parents ,,and ,,children ,by ,bernard ,shaw ,,contents ,parents and ,children ,trailing ,clouds of ,glory ,the ,child is ,father to the ,man ,what is a ,child8 ,the ,sin of ,nadab and ,abihu ,the ,manufacture of ,monsters ,small and ,large ,families ,children as ,nuisances ,child ,fanciers ,childhood as a ,state of ,sin ,school ,my ,scholastic ,acquirements ,schoolmasters of ,genius ,what ,we ,do ,not ,teach1 and ,why ,taboo in ,schools ,alleged ,novelties in ,modern ,schools ,what is to be ,done8 ,children's ,rights and ,duties ,should ,children ,earn their ,living8 ,children's ,happiness ,the ,horror of the ,perpetual ,holiday ,university ,schoolboyishness ,the ,new ,laziness ,the ,infinite ,school ,task ,the ,rewards and ,risks of ,knowledge ,english ,physical ,hardihood and ,spiritual ,cowardice ,the ,risks of ,ignorance and ,weakness ,the ,common ,sense of ,toleration ,the ,sin of ,athanasius ,the ,experiment ,experimenting ,why ,we ,loathe ,learning and ,love ,sport ,antichrist ,under the ,whip ,technical ,instruction ,docility and ,dependence ,the ,abuse of ,docility ,the ,schoolboy and the ,homeboy ,the ,comings of ,age of ,children ,the ,conflict of ,wills ,the ,demagogue's ,opportunity ,our ,quarrelsomeness ,we ,must ,reform ,society before we can ,reform ,ourselves ,the ,pursuit of ,manners ,not too much ,wind on the ,heath1 ,brother ,wanted3 a ,child's ,magna ,charta ,the ,pursuit of ,learning ,children and ,game3 a ,proposal ,the ,parents' ,intolerable ,burden ,mobilization ,children's ,rights and ,parents' ,wrongs ,how ,little ,we ,know ,about ,our ,parents ,our ,abandoned ,mothers ,family ,affection ,the ,fate of the ,family ,family ,mourning ,art ,teaching ,the ,impossibility of ,secular ,education ,natural ,selection as a ,religion ,moral ,instruction ,leagues ,the ,bible ,artist ,idolatry ,the ,machine ,the ,provocation to ,anarchism ,imagination ,government by ,bullies ,,parents ,,and ,,children ,trailing ,clouds of ,glory ,childhood is a stage in the process of that continual remanufacture of the ,life ,stuff by which the human race is perpetuated4 ,the ,life ,force either will not or cannot achieve immortality except in very low organisms3 indeed it is by no means ascertained that even the amoeba is immortal4 ,human beings visibly wear out1 though they last longer than their friends the dogs4 ,turtles1 parrots1 and elephants are believed to be capable of outliving the memory of the oldest human inhabitant4 ,but the fact that new ones are born conclusively proves that they are not immortal4 ,do away with death and you do away with the need for birth3 in fact if you went on breeding1 you would finally have to kill old people to make room for young ones4 ,now death is not necessarily a failure of energy on the part of the ,life ,force4 ,people with no imagination try to make things which will last for ever1 and even want to live for ever themselves4 ,but the intelligently imaginative man knows very well that it is waste of labor to make a machine that will last ten years1 because it will probably be superseded in half that time by an improved machine answering the same purpose4 ,he also knows that if some devil were to convince us that our dream of personal immortality is no dream but a hard fact1 such a shriek of despair would go up from the human race as no other conceivable horror could provoke4 ,with all our perverse nonsense as to ,john ,smith living for a thousand million eons and for ever after1 we die voluntarily1 knowing that it is time for us to be scrapped1 to be remanufactured1 to come back1 as ,wordsworth divined1 trailing ever brightening clouds of glory4 ,we must all be born again1 and yet again and again4 ,we should like to live a little longer just as we should like #ej pounds3 that is1 we should take it if we could get it for nothing2 but that sort of idle liking is not will4 ,it is amazing--considering the way we talk--how little a man will do to get #ej pounds3 all the #ej-pound notes ,i have ever known of have been more easily earned than a laborious sixpence2 but the difficulty of inducing a man to make any serious effort to obtain #ej pounds is nothing to the difficulty of inducing him to make a serious effort to keep alive4 ,the moment he sees death approach1 he gets into bed and sends for a doctor4 ,he knows very well at the back of his conscience that he is rather a poor job and had better be remanufactured4 ,he knows that his death will make room for a birth2 and he hopes that it will be a birth of something that he aspired to be and fell short of4 ,he knows that it is through death and rebirth that this corruptible shall become incorruptible1 and this mortal put on immortality4 ,practise as you will on his ignorance1 his fears1 and his imagination1 with bribes of paradises and threats of hells1 there is only one belief that can rob death of its sting and the grave of its victory2 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 evolution1 which can only be a being that cannot be improved upon4 ,after all1 what man is capable of the insane self-conceit of believing that an eternity of himself would be tolerable even to himself8 ,those who try to believe it postulate that they shall be made perfect first4 ,but if you make me perfect ,i shall no longer be myself1 nor will it be possible for me to conceive my present imperfections 7and what ,i cannot conceive ,i cannot remember72 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 mutton4 ,thus1 oddly enough1 the conventional belief in the matter comes to this3 that if you wish to live for ever you must be wicked enough to be irretrievably damned1 since the saved are no longer what they were1 and in hell alone do people retain their sinful nature3 that is to say1 their individuality4 ,and this sort of hell1 however convenient as a means of intimidating persons who have practically no honor and no conscience1 is not a fact4 ,death is for many of us the gate of hell2 but we are inside on the way out1 not outside on the way in4 ,therefore let us give up telling one another idle stories1 and rejoice in death as we rejoice in birth2 for without death we cannot be born again2 and the man who does not wish to be born again and born better is fit only to represent the ,city of ,london in ,parliament1 or perhaps the university of ,oxford4 ,the ,child is ,father to the ,man ,is he8 ,then in the name of common sense why do we always treat children on the assumption that the man is father to the child8 ,oh1 these fathers6 ,and we are not content with fathers3 we must have godfathers1 forgetting that the child is godfather to the man4 ,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 heaven1 two very limited individual mortals should be allowed to appear at its baptism and explain that they are its godparents1 and that they will look after its salvation until it is no longer a child4 ,i had a godmother who made herself responsible in this way for me4 ,she presented me with a ,bible with a gilt clasp and edges1 larger than the ,bibles similarly presented to my sisters1 because my sex entitled me to a heavier article4 ,i must have seen that lady at least four times in the twenty years following4 ,she never alluded to my salvation in any way4 ,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 notions4 ,a person with a turn for logic might argue that if ,god is the ,father of all men1 and if the child is father to the man1 it follows that the true representative of ,god at the christening is the child itself4 ,but such posers are unpopular1 because they imply that our little customs1 or1 as we often call them1 our religion1 mean something1 or must originally have meant something1 and that we understand and believe that something4 ,however1 my business is not to make confusion worse confounded1 but to clear it up4 ,only1 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 confused4 ,on the whole1 whatever our theory or no theory may be1 our practice is to treat the child as the property of its immediate physical parents1 and to allow them to do what they like with it as far as it will let them4 ,it has no rights and no liberties3 in short1 its condition is that which adults recognize as the most miserable and dangerous politically possible for themselves3 namely1 the condition of slavery4 ,for its alleviation we trust to the natural affection of the parties1 and to public opinion4 ,a father cannot for his own credit let his son go in rags4 ,also1 in a very large section of the population1 parents finally become dependent on their children4 ,thus there are checks on child slavery which do not exist1 or are less powerful1 in the case of manual and industrial slavery4 ,sensationally bad cases fall into two classes1 which are really the same class3 namely1 the children whose parents are excessively addicted to the sensual luxury of petting children1 and the children whose parents are excessively addicted to the sensual luxury of physically torturing them4 ,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 stepmothers1 or fathers than slave-drivers4 ,and there is a growing body of law designed to prevent parents from using their children ruthlessly to make money for the household4 ,such legislation has always been furiously resisted by the parents1 even when the horrors of factory slavery were at their worst2 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 ,parliament4 ,in domestic life a great deal of service is done by children1 the girls acting as nursemaids and general servants1 and the lads as errand boys4 ,in the country both boys and girls do a substantial share of farm labor4 ,this is why it is necessary to coerce poor parents to send their children to school1 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 hands4 ,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 relations4 ,it sometimes intensifies it1 sometimes mitigates it2 but on the whole children and parents confront one another as two classes in which all the political power is on one side2 and the results are not at all unlike what they would be if there were no immediate consanguinity between them1 and one were white and the other black1 or one enfranchised and the other disenfranchised1 or one ranked as gentle and the other simple4 ,not that ,nature counts for nothing in the case and political rights for everything4 ,but a denial of political rights1 and the resultant delivery of one class into the mastery of another1 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 abolished4 ,what is a ,child8 ,an experiment4 ,a fresh attempt to produce the just man made perfect3 that is1 to make humanity divine4 ,and you will vitiate the experiment if you make the slightest attempt to abort it into some fancy figure of your own3 for example1 your notion of a good man or a womanly woman4 ,if you treat it as a little wild beast to be tamed1 or as a pet to be played with1 or even as a means to save you trouble and to make money for you 7and these are our commonest ways71 it may fight its way through in spite of you and save its soul alive2 for all its instincts will resist you1 and possibly be strengthened in the resistance2 but if you begin with its own holiest aspirations1 and suborn them for your own purposes1 then there is hardly any limit to the mischief you may do4 ,swear at a child1 throw your boots at it1 send it flying from the room with a cuff or a kick2 and the experience will be as instructive to the child as a difficulty with a short-tempered dog or a bull4 ,francis ,place tells us that his father always struck his children when he found one within his reach4 ,the effect on the young ,places seems to have been simply to make them keep out of their father's way1 which was no doubt what he desired1 as far as he desired anything at all4 ,francis records the habit without bitterness1 having reason to thank his stars that his father respected the inside of his head whilst cuffing the outside of it2 and this made it easy for ,francis to do yeoman's service to his country as that rare and admirable thing1 a ,freethinker3 the only sort of thinker1 ,i may remark1 whose thoughts1 and consequently whose religious convictions1 command any respect4 ,now ,mr ,place1 senior1 would be described by many as a bad father2 and ,i do not contend that he was a conspicuously good one4 ,but as compared with the conventional good father who deliberately imposes himself on his son as a god2 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 wrong2 who imposes a corresponding conduct on the child by a system of prohibitions and penalties1 rewards and eulogies1 for which he claims divine sanction3 compared to this sort of abortionist and monster maker1 ,i say1 ,place appears almost as a ,providence4 ,not that it is possible to live with children any more than with grown-up people without imposing rules of conduct on them4 ,there is a point at which every person with human nerves has to say to a child ,stop that noise4 ,but suppose the child asks why6 ,there are various answers in use4 ,the simplest3 ,because it irritates me1 may fail2 for it may strike the child as being rather amusing to irritate you2 also the child1 having comparatively no nerves1 may be unable to conceive your meaning vividly enough4 ,in any case it may want to make a noise more than to spare your feelings4 ,you may therefore have to explain that the effect of the irritation will be that you will do something unpleasant if the noise continues4 ,the something unpleasant may be only a look of suffering to rouse the child's affectionate sympathy 7if it has any71 or it may run to forcible expulsion from the room with plenty of unnecessary violence2 but the principle is the same3 there are no false pretences involved3 the child learns in a straightforward way that it does not pay to be inconsiderate4 ,also1 perhaps1 that ,mamma1 who made the child learn the ,sermon on the ,mount1 is not really a ,christian4 ,the ,sin of ,nadab and ,abihu ,but there is another sort of answer in wide use which is neither straightforward1 instructive1 nor harmless4 ,in its simplest form it substitutes for ,stop that noise1 ,dont be naughty1 which means that the child1 instead of annoying you by a perfectly healthy and natural infantile procedure1 is offending ,god4 ,this is a blasphemous lie2 and the fact that it is on the lips of every nurserymaid does not excuse it in the least4 ,dickens tells us of a nurserymaid who elaborated it into ,if you do that1 angels wont never love you4 ,i remember a servant who used to tell me that if ,i were not good1 by which she meant if ,i did not behave with a single eye to her personal convenience1 the cock would come down the chimney4 ,less imaginative but equally dishonest people told me ,i should go to hell if ,i did not make myself agreeable to them4 ,bodily violence1 provided it be the hasty expression of normal provoked resentment and not vicious cruelty1 cannot harm a child as this sort of pious fraud harms it4 ,there is a legal limit to physical cruelty2 and there are also human limits to it4 ,there is an active ,society which brings to book a good many parents who starve and torture and overwork their children1 and intimidates a good many more4 ,when parents of this type are caught1 they are treated as criminals2 and not infrequently the police have some trouble to save them from being lynched4 ,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 go4 ,now nobody knows the way a child should go4 ,all the ways discovered so far lead to the horrors of our existing civilizations1 described quite justifiably by ,ruskin as heaps of agonizing human maggots1 struggling with one another for scraps of food4 ,pious fraud is an attempt to pervert that precious and sacred thing the child's conscience into an instrument of our own convenience1 and to use that wonderful and terrible power called ,shame to grind our own axe4 ,it is the sin of stealing fire from the altar3 a sin so impudently practised by popes1 parents1 and pedagogues1 that one can hardly expect the nurserymaids to see any harm in stealing a few cinders when they are worrited4 ,into the blackest depths of this violation of children's souls one can hardly bear to look2 for here we find pious fraud masking the violation of the body by obscene cruelty4 ,any parent or school teacher who takes a secret and abominable delight in torture is allowed to lay traps into which every child must fall1 and then beat it to his or her heart's content4 ,a gentleman once wrote to me and said1 with an obvious conviction that he was being most reasonable and high minded1 that the only thing he beat his children for was failure in perfect obedience and perfect truthfulness4 ,on these attributes1 he said1 he must insist4 ,as one of them is not a virtue at all1 and the other is the attribute of a god1 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 pretensions4 ,and yet he might have written his letter to ,the ,times 7he very nearly did1 by the way7 without incurring any danger of being removed to an asylum1 or even losing his reputation for taking a very proper view of his parental duties4 ,and at least it was not a trivial view1 nor an ill meant one4 ,it was much more respectable than the general consensus of opinion that if a school teacher can devise a question a child cannot answer1 or overhear it calling omega omeega1 he or she may beat the child viciously4 ,only1 the cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse1 and a pretence of reluctance4 ,it must be for the child's good4 ,the assailant must say ,this hurts me more than it hurts you4 ,there must be hypocrisy as well as cruelty4 ,the injury to the child would be far less if the voluptuary said frankly ,i beat you because ,i like beating you2 and ,i shall do it whenever ,i can contrive an excuse for it4 ,but to represent this detestable lust to the child as ,divine wrath1 and the cruelty as the beneficent act of ,god1 which is exactly what all our floggers do1 is to add to the torture of the body1 out of which the flogger at least gets some pleasure1 the maiming and blinding of the child's soul1 which can bring nothing but horror to anyone4 ,the ,manufacture of ,monsters ,this industry is by no means peculiar to ,china4 ,the ,chinese 7they say7 make physical monsters4 ,we revile them for it and proceed to make moral monsters of our own children4 ,the most excusable parents are those who try to correct their own faults in their offspring4 ,the parent who says to his child3 ,i am one of the successes of the ,almighty3 therefore imitate me in every particular or ,i will have the skin off your back 7a quite common attitude7 is a much more absurd figure than the man who1 with a pipe in his mouth1 thrashes his boy for smoking4 ,if you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson 7which is not at all necessary71 hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example4 ,but you had much better let the child's character alone4 ,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 ,force4 ,you are assuming that the child does not know its own business1 and that you do4 ,in this you are sure to be wrong3 the child feels the drive of the ,life ,force 7often called the ,will of ,god72 and you cannot feel it for him4 ,handel's parents no doubt thought they knew better than their child when they tried to prevent his becoming a musician4 ,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 direction4 ,handel would have been ,handel1 and ,napoleon and ,peter of ,russia themselves in spite of all the parents in creation1 because1 as often happens1 they were stronger than their parents4 ,but this does not happen always4 ,most children can be1 and many are1 hopelessly warped and wasted by parents who are ignorant and silly enough to suppose that they know what a human being ought to be1 and who stick at nothing in their determination to force their children into their moulds4 ,every child has a right to its own bent4 ,it has a right to be a ,plymouth ,brother though its parents be convinced atheists4 ,it has a right to dislike its mother or father or sister or brother or uncle or aunt if they are antipathetic to it4 ,it has a right to find its own way and go its own way1 whether that way seems wise or foolish to others1 exactly as an adult has4 ,it has a right to privacy as to its own doings and its own affairs as much as if it were its own father4 ,small and ,large ,families ,these rights have now become more important than they used to be1 because the modern practice of limiting families enables them to be more effectually violated4 ,in a family of ten1 eight1 six1 or even four children1 the rights of the younger ones to a great extent take care of themselves and of the rights of the elder ones too4 ,two adult parents1 in spite of a house to keep and an income to earn1 can still interfere to a disastrous extent with the rights and liberties of one child4 ,but by the time a fourth child has arrived1 they are not only outnumbered two to one1 but are getting tired of the thankless and mischievous job of bringing up their children in the way they think they should go4 ,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 attention4 ,the children may receive a good deal of individual attention from one another in the shape of outspoken reproach1 ruthless ridicule1 and violent resistance to their attempts at aggression2 but the parental despots are compelled by the multitude of their subjects to resort to political rather than personal rule1 and to spread their attempts at moral monster-making over so many children1 that each child has enough freedom1 and enough sport in the prophylactic process of laughing at its elders behind their backs1 to escape with much less damage than the single child4 ,in a large school the system may be bad2 but the personal influence of the head master has to be exerted1 when it is exerted at all1 in a public way1 because he has little more power of working on the affections of the individual scholar in the intimate way that1 for example1 the mother of a single child can1 than the prime minister has of working on the affections of any individual voter4 ,children as ,nuisances ,experienced parents1 when children's rights are preached to them1 very naturally ask whether children are to be allowed to do what they like4 ,the best reply is to ask whether adults are to be allowed to do what they like4 ,the two cases are the same4 ,the adult who is nasty is not allowed to do what he likes3 neither can the child who likes to be nasty4 ,there is no difference in principle between the rights of a child and those of an adult3 the difference in their cases is one of circumstance4 ,an adult is not supposed to be punished except by process of law2 nor1 when he is so punished1 is the person whom he has injured allowed to act as judge1 jury1 and executioner4 ,it is true that employers do act in this way every day to their workpeople2 but this is not a justified and intended part of the situation3 it is an abuse of ,capitalism which nobody defends in principle4 ,as between child and parent or nurse it is not argued about because it is inevitable4 ,you cannot hold an impartial judicial inquiry every time a child misbehaves itself4 ,to allow the child to misbehave without instantly making it unpleasantly conscious of the fact would be to spoil it4 ,the adult has therefore to take action of some sort with nothing but his conscience to shield the child from injustice or unkindness4 ,the action may be a torrent of scolding culminating in a furious smack causing terror and pain1 or it may be a remonstrance causing remorse1 or it may be a sarcasm causing shame and humiliation1 or it may be a sermon causing the child to believe that it is a little reprobate on the road to hell4 ,the child has no defence in any case except the kindness and conscience of the adult2 and the adult had better not forget this2 for it involves a heavy responsibility4 ,and now comes our difficulty4 ,the responsibility1 being so heavy1 cannot be discharged by persons of feeble character or intelligence4 ,and yet people of high character and intelligence cannot be plagued with the care of children4 ,a child is a restless1 noisy little animal1 with an insatiable appetite for knowledge1 and consequently a maddening persistence in asking questions4 ,if the child is to remain in the room with a highly intelligent and sensitive adult1 it must be told1 and if necessary forced1 to sit still and not speak1 which is injurious to its health1 unnatural1 unjust1 and therefore cruel and selfish beyond toleration4 ,consequently the highly intelligent and sensitive adult hands the child over to a nurserymaid who has no nerves and can therefore stand more noise1 but who has also no scruples1 and may therefore be very bad company for the child4 ,here we have come to the central fact of the question3 a fact nobody avows1 which is yet the true explanation of the monstrous system of child imprisonment and torture which we disguise under such hypocrisies as education1 training1 formation of character and the rest of it4 ,this fact is simply that a child is a nuisance to a grown-up person4 ,what is more1 the nuisance becomes more and more intolerable as the grown-up person becomes more cultivated1 more sensitive1 and more deeply engaged in the highest methods of adult work4 ,the child at play is noisy and ought to be noisy3 ,sir ,isaac ,newton at work is quiet and ought to be quiet4 ,and the child should spend most of its time at play1 whilst the adult should spend most of his time at work4 ,i am not now writing on behalf of persons who coddle themselves into a ridiculous condition of nervous feebleness1 and at last imagine themselves unable to work under conditions of bustle which to healthy people are cheerful and stimulating4 ,i am sure that if people had to choose between living where the noise of children never stopped and where it was never heard1 all the goodnatured and sound people would prefer the incessant noise to the incessant silence4 ,but that choice is not thrust upon us by the nature of things4 ,there is no reason why children and adults should not see just as much of one another as is good for them1 no more and no less4 ,even at present you are not compelled to choose between sending your child to a boarding school 7which means getting rid of it altogether on more or less hypocritical pretences7 and keeping it continually at home4 ,most working folk today either send their children to day schools or turn them out of doors4 ,this solves the problem for the parents4 ,it does not solve it for the children1 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 dog2 but it shews that in no class are people willing to endure the society of their children1 and consequently that it is an error to believe that the family provides children with edifying adult society1 or that the family is a social unit4 ,the family is in that1 as in so many other respects1 a humbug4 ,old people and young people cannot walk at the same pace without distress and final loss of health to one of the parties4 ,when they are sitting indoors they cannot endure the same degrees of temperature and the same supplies of fresh air4 ,even if the main factors of noise1 restlessness1 and inquisitiveness are left out of account1 children can stand with indifference sights1 sounds1 smells1 and disorders that would make an adult of fifty utterly miserable2 whilst on the other hand such adults find a tranquil happiness in conditions which to children mean unspeakable boredom4 ,and since our system is nevertheless to pack them all into the same house and pretend that they are happy1 and that this particular sort of happiness is the foundation of virtue1 it is found that in discussing family life we never speak of actual adults or actual children1 or of realities of any sort1 but always of ideals such as ,the ,home1 a ,mother's ,influence1 a ,father's ,care1 ,filial ,piety1 ,duty1 ,affection1 ,family ,life1 etc4 etc41 which are no doubt very comforting phrases1 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 practice4 ,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 them8 ,the home may be a thieves' kitchen1 the mother a procuress1 the father a violent drunkard2 or the mother and father may be fashionable people who see their children three or four times a year during the holidays1 and then not oftener than they can help1 living meanwhile in daily and intimate contact with their valets and lady's-maids1 whose influence and care are often dominant in the household4 ,affection1 as distinguished from simple kindliness1 may or may not exist3 when it does it either depends on qualities in the parties that would produce it equally if they were of no kin to one another1 or it is a more or less morbid survival of the nursing passion2 for affection between adults 7if they are really adult in mind and not merely grown-up children7 and creatures so relatively selfish and cruel as children necessarily are without knowing it or meaning it1 cannot be called natural3 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 maturity2 for women who cannot bear to be separated from their pet dogs send their children to boarding schools cheerfully4 ,they may say and even believe that in allowing their children to leave home they are sacrificing themselves for their children's good2 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 hearthrug4 ,besides1 to allege that children are better continually away from home is to give up the whole popular sentimental theory of the family2 yet the dogs are kept and the children are banished4 ,child ,fanciers ,there is1 however1 a good deal of spurious family affection4 ,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-law4 ,and there is a strong sense of property in children1 which often makes mothers and fathers bitterly jealous of allowing anyone else to interfere with their children1 whom they may none the less treat very badly4 ,and there is an extremely dangerous craze for children which leads certain people to establish orphanages and baby farms and schools1 seizing any pretext for filling their houses with children exactly as some eccentric old ladies and gentlemen fill theirs with cats4 ,in such places the children are the victims of all the caprices of doting affection and all the excesses of lascivious cruelty4 ,yet the people who have this morbid craze seldom have any difficulty in finding victims4 ,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 whitewashed4 ,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 ,creakle1 and to pretend that ,squeers and ,creakle are monsters of the past4 ,but read the autobiography of ,stanley the traveller1 or sit in the company of men talking about their school-days1 and you will soon find that fiction1 which must1 if it is to be sold and read1 stop short of being positively sickening1 dare not tell the whole truth about the people to whom children are handed over on educational pretexts4 ,not very long ago a schoolmaster in ,ireland was murdered by his boys2 and for reasons which were never made public it was at first decided not to prosecute the murderers4 ,yet all these flogging schoolmasters and orphanage fiends and baby farmers are lovers of children4 ,they are really child fanciers 7like bird fanciers or dog fanciers7 by irresistible natural predilection1 never happy unless they are surrounded by their victims1 and always certain to make their living by accepting the custody of children1 no matter how many alternative occupations may be available4 ,and bear in mind that they are only the extreme instances of what is commonly called natural affection1 apparently because it is obviously unnatural4 ,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 bearing1 and to pretend that the places they send them to are well conducted1 beneficial1 and indispensable to the success of the children in after life4 ,the true cry of the kind mother after her little rosary of kisses is ,run away1 darling4 ,it is nicer than ,hold your noise1 you young devil2 or it will be the worse for you2 but fundamentally it means the same thing3 that if you compel an adult and a child to live in one another's company either the adult or the child will be miserable4 ,there is nothing whatever unnatural or wrong or shocking in this fact2 and there is no harm in it if only it be sensibly faced and provided for4 ,the mischief that it does at present is produced by our efforts to ignore it1 or to smother it under a heap of sentimental lies and false pretences4 ,childhood as a ,state of ,sin ,unfortunately all this nonsense tends to accumulate as we become more sympathetic4 ,in many families it is still the custom to treat childhood frankly as a state of sin1 and impudently proclaim the monstrous principle that little children should be seen and not heard1 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 interests1 either remote or immediate1 of the children4 ,this system tends to produce a tough1 rather brutal1 stupid1 unscrupulous class1 with a fixed idea that all enjoyment consists in undetected sinning2 and in certain phases of civilization people of this kind are apt to get the upper hand of more amiable and conscientious races and classes4 ,they have the ferocity of a chained dog1 and are proud of it4 ,but the end of it is that they are always in chains1 even at the height of their military or political success3 they win everything on condition that they are afraid to enjoy it4 ,their civilizations rest on intimidation1 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 panic4 ,in the end they get found out and bullied4 ,but that is not the point that concerns us here1 which is1 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 children1 and who end by neither making their children happy nor having a tolerable life for themselves4 ,a selfish tyrant you know where to have1 and he 7or she7 at least does not confuse your affections2 but a conscientious and kindly meddler may literally worry you out of your senses4 ,it is fortunate that only very few parents are capable of doing what they conceive their duty continuously or even at all1 and that still fewer are tough enough to ride roughshod over their children at home4 ,school ,but please observe the limitation at home4 ,what private amateur parental enterprise cannot do may be done very effectively by organized professional enterprise in large institutions established for the purpose4 ,and it is to such professional enterprise that parents hand over their children when they can afford it4 ,they send their children to school2 and there is1 on the whole1 nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school4 ,to begin with1 it is a prison4 ,but it is in some respects more cruel than a prison4 ,in a prison1 for instance1 you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor 7who of course would not be warders and governors if they could write readable books71 and beaten or otherwise tormented if you cannot remember their utterly unmemorable contents4 ,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 about1 and are therefore incapable of making you understand or care about4 ,in a prison they may torture your body2 but they do not torture your brains2 and they protect you against violence and outrage from your fellow prisoners4 ,in a school you have none of these advantages4 ,with the world's bookshelves loaded with fascinating and inspired books1 the very manna sent down from ,heaven to feed your souls1 you are forced to read a hideous imposture called a school book1 written by a man who cannot write3 a book from which no human being can learn anything3 a book which1 though you may decipher it1 you cannot in any fruitful sense read1 though the enforced attempt will make you loathe the sight of a book all the rest of your life4 ,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 accessible1 or with streets and shop windows and crowds and vehicles and all sorts of city delights at the door1 you are forced to sit1 not in a room with some human grace and comfort or furniture and decoration1 but in a stalled pound with a lot of other children1 beaten if you talk1 beaten if you move1 beaten if you cannot prove by answering idiotic questions that even when you escaped from the pound and from the eye of your gaoler1 you were still agonizing over his detestable sham books instead of daring to live4 ,and your childish hatred of your gaoler and flogger is nothing to his adult hatred of you2 for he is a slave forced to endure your society for his daily bread4 ,you have not even the satisfaction of knowing how you are torturing him and how he loathes you2 and you give yourself unnecessary pains to annoy him with furtive tricks and spiteful doing of forbidden things4 ,no wonder he is sometimes provoked to fiendish outbursts of wrath4 ,no wonder men of downright sense1 like ,dr ,johnson1 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 flagellation4 ,it is a ghastly business1 quite beyond words1 this schooling4 ,and now ,i hear cries of protest arising all round4 ,first my own schoolmasters1 or their ghosts1 asking whether ,i was cruelly beaten at school8 ,no2 but then ,i did not learn anything at school4 ,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 lessons4 ,none of my schoolmasters really cared a rap 7or 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 powers7 whether ,i learnt my lessons or not1 provided my father paid my schooling bill1 the collection of which was the real object of the school4 ,consequently ,i did not learn my school lessons1 having much more important ones in hand1 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 spirit4 ,my schooling did me a great deal of harm and no good whatever3 it was simply dragging a child's soul through the dirt2 but ,i escaped ,squeers and ,creakle just as ,i escaped ,johnson and ,carlyle4 ,and this is what happens to most of us4 ,we are not effectively coerced to learn3 we stave off punishment as far as we can by lying and trickery and guessing and using our wits2 and when this does not suffice we scribble impositions1 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 7he not being allowed to hit us too hard7 to outface the dishonor we should have been taught to die rather than endure4 ,and so idleness and worthlessness on the one hand and a pretence of coercion on the other became a despicable routine4 ,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 school1 telling me that ,i was thoroughly disloyal to it2 that ,i had no intention of learning2 that ,i was mocking and distracting the boys who did wish to learn2 that ,i was a liar and a shirker and a seditious little nuisance2 and that nothing could injure me in character and degrade their occupation more than allowing me 7much less forcing me7 to remain in the school under such conditions4 ,but in order to get expelled1 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 delinquent4 ,i can remember only one case in which such a penalty was threatened2 and in that case the culprit1 a boarder1 had kissed a housemaid1 or possibly1 being a handsome youth1 been kissed by her4 ,she did not kiss me2 and nobody ever dreamt of expelling me4 ,the truth was1 a boy meant just so much a year to the institution4 ,that was why he was kept there against his will4 ,that was why he was kept there when his expulsion would have been an unspeakable relief and benefit both to his teachers and himself4 ,it may be argued that if the uncommercial attitude had been taken1 and all the disloyal wasters and idlers shewn sternly to the door1 the school would not have been emptied1 but filled4 ,but so honest an attitude was impossible4 ,the masters must have hated the school much more than the boys did4 ,just as you cannot imprison a man without imprisoning a warder to see that he does not escape1 the warder being tied to the prison as effectually by the fear of unemployment and starvation as the prisoner is by the bolts and bars1 so these poor schoolmasters1 with their small salaries and large classes1 were as much prisoners as we were1 and much more responsible and anxious ones4 ,they could not impose the heroic attitude on their employers2 nor would they have been able to obtain places as schoolmasters if their habits had been heroic4 ,for the best of them their employment was provisional3 they looked forward to escaping from it into the pulpit4 ,the ablest and most impatient of them were often so irritated by the awkward1 slow-witted1 slovenly boys3 that is1 the ones that required special consideration and patient treatment1 that they vented their irritation on them ruthlessly1 nothing being easier than to entrap or bewilder such a boy into giving a pretext for punishing him4 ,my ,scholastic ,acquirements ,the results1 as far as ,i was concerned1 were what might have been expected4 ,my school made only the thinnest pretence of teaching anything but ,latin and ,greek4 ,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 uncle4 ,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 me1 and had learnt nothing else4 ,to this day1 though ,i can still decline a ,latin noun and repeat some of the old paradigms in the old meaningless way1 because their rhythm sticks to me1 ,i have never yet seen a ,latin inscription on a tomb that ,i could translate throughout4 ,of ,greek ,i can decipher perhaps the greater part of the ,greek alphabet4 ,in short1 ,i am1 as to classical education1 another ,shakespear4 ,i can read ,french as easily as ,english2 and under pressure of necessity ,i can turn to account some scraps of ,german and a little operatic ,italian2 but these ,i was never taught at school4 ,instead1 ,i was taught lying1 dishonorable submission to tyranny1 dirty stories1 a blasphemous habit of treating love and maternity as obscene jokes1 hopelessness1 evasion1 derision1 cowardice1 and all the blackguard's shifts by which the coward intimidates other cowards4 ,and if ,i had been a boarder at an ,english public school instead of a day boy at an ,irish one1 ,i might have had to add to these1 deeper shames still4 ,schoolmasters of ,genius ,and now1 if ,i have reduced the ghosts of my schoolmasters to melancholy acquiescence in all this 7which everybody who has been at an ordinary school will recognize as true71 ,i have still to meet the much more sincere protests of the handful of people who have a natural genius for bringing up children4 ,i shall be asked with kindly scorn whether ,i have heard of ,froebel and ,pestalozzi1 whether ,i know the work that is being done by ,miss ,mason and the ,dottoressa ,montessori or1 best of all as ,i think1 the ,eurythmics ,school of ,jacques ,dalcroze at ,hellerau near ,dresden4 ,jacques ,dalcroze1 like ,plato1 believes in saturating his pupils with music4 ,they walk to music1 play to music1 work to music1 obey drill commands that would bewilder a guardsman to music1 think to music1 live to music1 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 rhythms1 and1 what is more1 make music for others to do all these things to4 ,stranger still1 though ,jacques ,dalcroze1 like all these great teachers1 is the completest of tyrants1 knowing what is right and that he must and will have the lesson just so or else break his heart 7not somebody else's1 observe71 yet his school is so fascinating that every woman who sees it exclaims ,oh1 why was ,i not taught like this6 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 other1 and start off on earnest walks round the room1 taking two steps backward whenever ,monsieur ,daleroze calls out ,hop6 ,oh yes3 ,i know all about these wonderful schools that you cannot keep children or even adults out of1 and these teachers whom their pupils not only obey without coercion1 but adore4 ,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 week1 ,i will estimate your chances of converting your millions of little scholastic hells into little scholastic heavens4 ,if you are a distressed gentlewoman starting to make a living1 you can still open a little school2 and you can easily buy a secondhand brass plate inscribed ,,pestalozzian ,,institute and nail it to your door1 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 cure4 ,or you can buy a cheaper plate inscribed ,,kindergarten1 and imagine1 or leave others to imagine1 that ,froebel is the governing genius of your little creche4 ,no doubt the new brass plates are being inscribed ,montessori ,institute1 and will be used when the ,dotteressa is no longer with us by all the ,mrs ,pipchins and ,mrs ,wilfers throughout this unhappy land4 ,i will go further1 and admit that the brass plates may not all be frauds4 ,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 7he would not be allowed to teach anything now7 and that it took four years of ,harrow to obliterate that knowledge and change the love into loathing4 ,another friend of mine who keeps a school in the suburbs1 and who deeply deplores my prejudice against schoolmasters1 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 performed4 ,even among my own schoolmasters ,i can recollect a few whose classes interested me1 and whom ,i should certainly have pestered for information and instruction if ,i could have got into any decent human relationship with them1 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 wall4 ,but these rare cases actually do more harm than good2 for they encourage us to pretend that all schoolmasters are like that4 ,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 opportunity8 ,for that matter1 it is possible1 if difficult1 to find a solicitor1 or even a judge1 who has some notion of what law means1 a doctor with a glimmering of science1 an officer who understands duty and discipline1 and a clergyman with an inkling of religion1 though there are nothing like enough of them to go round4 ,but even the few who1 like ,ibsen's ,mrs ,solness1 have a genius for nursing the souls of little children are like angels forced to work in prisons instead of in heaven2 and even at that they are mostly underpaid and despised4 ,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 him4 ,my friend1 not considering that the unfortunate man was probably goaded beyond endurance1 smote the schoolmaster and blackened his eye4 ,the schoolmaster appealed to the law2 and my friend found himself waiting nervously in the ,hammersmith ,police ,court to answer for his breach of the peace4 ,in his anxiety he asked a police officer what would happen to him4 ,what did you do8 said the officer4 ,i gave a man a black eye said my friend4 ,six pounds if he was a gentleman3 two pounds if he wasnt1 said the constable4 ,he was a schoolmaster said my friend4 ,two pounds said the officer2 and two pounds it was4 ,the blood money was paid cheerfully2 and ,i have ever since advised elementary schoolmasters to qualify themselves in the art of self-defence1 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 man4 ,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 do8 ,no3 ,i cannot be put off by the news that our system would be perfect if it were worked by angels4 ,i do not admit it even at that1 just as ,i do not admit that if the sky fell we should all catch larks4 ,but ,i do not propose to bother about a supply of specific genius which does not exist1 and which1 if it did exist1 could operate only by at once recognizing and establishing the rights of children4 ,what ,we ,do ,not ,teach1 and ,why ,to my mind1 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 mischief1 and not to qualify them for their part in life as responsible citizens of a free ,state4 ,it is not possible to maintain freedom in any ,state1 no matter how perfect its original constitution1 unless its publicly active citizens know a good deal of constitutional history1 law1 and political science1 with its basis of economics4 ,if as much pains had been taken a century ago to make us all understand ,ricardo's law of rent as to learn our catechisms1 the face of the world would have been changed for the better4 ,but for that very reason the greatest care is taken to keep such beneficially subversive knowledge from us1 with the result that in public life we are either place-hunters1 anarchists1 or sheep shepherded by wolves4 ,but it will be observed that these are highly controversial subjects4 ,now no controversial subject can be taught dogmatically4 ,he who knows only the official side of a controversy knows less than nothing of its nature4 ,the abler a schoolmaster is1 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 error4 ,at present such teaching is very unpopular4 ,it does not exist in schools2 but every adult who derives his knowledge of public affairs from the newspapers can take in1 at the cost of an extra halfpenny1 two papers of opposite politics4 ,yet the ordinary man so dislikes having his mind unsettled1 as he calls it1 that he angrily refuses to allow a paper which dissents from his views to be brought into his house4 ,even at his club he resents seeing it1 and excludes it if it happens to run counter to the opinions of all the members4 ,the result is that his opinions are not worth considering4 ,a churchman who never reads ,the ,freethinker very soon has no more real religion than the atheist who never reads ,the ,church ,times4 ,the attitude is the same in both cases3 they want to hear nothing good of their enemies2 consequently they remain enemies and suffer from bad blood all their lives2 whereas men who know their opponents and understand their case1 quite commonly respect and like them1 and always learn something from them4 ,here1 again1 as at so many points1 we come up against the abuse of schools to keep people in ignorance and error1 so that they may be incapable of successful revolt against their industrial slavery4 ,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 consumes1 inflicts on the community precisely the same injury that a thief produces1 and would1 in any honest ,state1 be treated as a thief1 however full his or her pockets might be of money made by other people4 ,the nation that first teaches its children that truth1 instead of flogging them if they discover it for themselves1 may have to fight all the slaves of all the other nations to begin with2 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 back4 ,this1 however1 is not an evil produced by the denial of children's rights1 nor is it inherent in the nature of schools4 ,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 reformer4 ,a word must also be said about the opposition to reform of the vested interest of the classical and coercive schoolmaster4 ,he1 poor wretch1 has no other means of livelihood2 and reform would leave him as a workman is now left when he is superseded by a machine4 ,he had therefore better do what he can to get the workman compensated1 so as to make the public familiar with the idea of compensation before his own turn comes4 ,taboo in ,schools ,the suppression of economic knowledge1 disastrous as it is1 is quite intelligible1 its corrupt motive being as clear as the motive of a burglar for concealing his jemmy from a policeman4 ,but the other great suppression in our schools1 the suppression of the subject of sex1 is a case of taboo4 ,in mankind1 the lower the type1 and the less cultivated the mind1 the less courage there is to face important subjects objectively4 ,the ablest and most highly cultivated people continually discuss religion1 politics1 and sex3 it is hardly an exaggeration to say that they discuss nothing else with fully-awakened interest4 ,commoner and less cultivated people1 even when they form societies for discussion1 make a rule that politics and religion are not to be mentioned1 and take it for granted that no decent person would attempt to discuss sex4 ,the three subjects are feared because they rouse the crude passions which call for furious gratification in murder and rapine at worst1 and1 at best1 lead to quarrels and undesirable states of consciousness4 ,even when this excuse of bad manners1 ill temper1 and brutishness 7for that is what it comes to7 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 pistols1 and sex discussion leads to obscenity1 it has no application to children except as an imperative reason for training them to respect other people's opinions1 and to insist on respect for their own in these as in other important matters which are equally dangerous3 for example1 money4 ,and in any case there are decisive reasons2 superior1 like the reasons for suspending conventional reticences between doctor and patient1 to all considerations of mere decorum1 for giving proper instruction in the facts of sex4 ,those who object to it 7not counting coarse people who thoughtlessly seize every opportunity of affecting and parading a fictitious delicacy7 are1 in effect1 advocating ignorance as a safeguard against precocity4 ,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 safeguard4 ,even as it is1 it seems undesirable that any special emphasis should be given to the subject1 whether by way of delicacy and poetry or too impressive warning4 ,but the plain fact is that in refusing to allow the child to be taught by qualified unrelated elders 7the parents shrink from the lesson1 even when they are otherwise qualified1 because their own relation to the child makes the subject impossible between them7 we are virtually arranging to have our children taught by other children in guilty secrets and unclean jests4 ,and that settles the question for all sensible people4 ,the dogmatic objection1 the sheer instinctive taboo which rules the subject out altogether as indecent1 has no age limit4 ,it means that at no matter what age a woman consents to a proposal of marriage1 she should do so in ignorance of the relation she is undertaking4 ,when this actually happens 7and apparently it does happen oftener than would seem possible7 a horrible fraud is being practiced on both the man and the woman4 ,he is led to believe that she knows what she is promising1 and that he is in no danger of finding himself bound to a woman to whom he is eugenically antipathetic4 ,she contemplates nothing but such affectionate relations as may exist between her and her nearest kinsmen1 and has no knowledge of the condition which1 if not foreseen1 must come as an amazing revelation and a dangerous shock1 ending possibly in the discovery that the marriage has been an irreparable mistake4 ,nothing can justify such a risk4 ,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 character4 ,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 undertaking4 ,alleged ,novelties in ,modern ,schools ,there is just one more nuisance to be disposed of before ,i come to the positive side of my case4 ,i mean the person who tells me that my schooldays belong to a bygone order of educational ideas and institutions1 and that schools are not now a bit like my old school4 ,i reply1 with ,sir ,walter ,raleigh1 by calling on my soul to give this statement the lie4 ,some years ago ,i lectured in ,oxford on the subject of ,education4 ,a friend to whom ,i mentioned my intention said1 ,you know nothing of modern education3 schools are not now what they were when you were a boy4 ,i immediately procured the time sheets of half a dozen modern schools1 and found1 as ,i expected1 that they might all have been my old school3 there was no real difference4 ,i may mention1 too1 that ,i have visited modern schools1 and observed that there is a tendency to hang printed pictures in an untidy and soulless manner on the walls1 and occasionally to display on the mantel-shelf a deplorable glass case containing certain objects which might possibly1 if placed in the hands of the pupils1 give them some practical experience of the weight of a pound and the length of an inch4 ,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 study4 ,a suggestion that ,nature is worth study would certainly have staggered my schoolmasters2 so perhaps ,i may admit a gleam of progress here4 ,but as any child who attempted to handle these dusty objects would probably be caned1 ,i do not attach any importance to such modernities in school furniture4 ,the school remains what it was in my boyhood1 because its real object remains what it was4 ,and that object1 ,i repeat1 is to keep the children out of mischief3 mischief meaning for the most part worrying the grown-ups4 ,what is to be ,done8 ,the practical question1 then1 is what to do with the children4 ,tolerate them at home we will not4 ,let them run loose in the streets we dare not until our streets become safe places for children1 which1 to our utter shame1 they are not at present1 though they can hardly be worse than some homes and some schools4 ,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 manor1 who asked me very properly what ,i was going to do for the village school4 ,i did not know what to reply4 ,as the school kept the children quiet during my working hours1 ,i did not for the sake of my own personal convenience want to blow it up with dynamite as ,i should like to blow up most schools4 ,so ,i asked for guidance4 ,you ought to give a prize1 said the lady4 ,i asked if there was a prize for good conduct4 ,as ,i expected1 there was3 one for the best-behaved boy and another for the best-behaved girl4 ,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-behaved1 in order to ascertain whether the school criterion of good conduct was valid out of school4 ,my offer was refused because it would not have had the effect of encouraging the children to give as little trouble as possible1 which is of course the real object of all conduct prizes in schools4 ,i must not pretend1 then1 that ,i have a system ready to replace all the other systems4 ,obstructing the way of the proper organization of childhood1 as of everything else1 lies our ridiculous misdistribution of the national income1 with its accompanying class distinctions and imposition of snobbery on children as a necessary part of their social training4 ,the result of our economic folly is that we are a nation of undesirable acquaintances2 and the first object of all our institutions for children is segregation4 ,if1 for example1 our children were set free to roam and play about as they pleased1 they would have to be policed2 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 society1 and that every child seen speaking to another child with a lower-class badge1 or any child wearing a higher badge than that allotted to it by1 say1 the ,college of ,heralds1 should immediately be skinned alive with a birch rod4 ,it might even be insisted that girls with high-class badges should be attended by footmen1 grooms1 or even military escorts4 ,in short1 there is hardly any limit to the follies with which our ,commercialism would infect any system that it would tolerate at all4 ,but something like a change of heart is still possible2 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 them4 ,children's ,rights and ,duties ,now let us ask what are a child's rights1 and what are the rights of society over the child4 ,its rights1 being clearly those of any other human being1 are summed up in the right to live3 that is1 to have all the conclusive arguments that prove that it would be better dead1 that it is a child of wrath1 that the population is already excessive1 that the pains of life are greater than its pleasures1 that its sacrifice in a hospital or laboratory experiment might save millions of lives1 etc4 etc4 etc41 put out of the question1 and its existence accepted as necessary and sacred1 all theories to the contrary notwithstanding1 whether by ,calvin or ,schopenhauer or ,pasteur or the nearest person with a taste for infanticide4 ,and this right to live includes1 and in fact is1 the right to be what the child likes and can1 to do what it likes and can1 to make what it likes and can1 to think what it likes and can1 to smash what it dislikes and can1 and generally to behave in an altogether unaccountable manner within the limits imposed by the similar rights of its neighbors4 ,and the rights of society over it clearly extend to requiring it to qualify itself to live in society without wasting other peoples time3 that is1 it must know the rules of the road1 be able to read placards and proclamations1 fill voting papers1 compose and send letters and telegrams1 purchase food and clothing and railway tickets for itself1 count money and give and take change1 and1 generally1 know how many beans made five4 ,it must know some law1 were it only a simple set of commandments1 some political economy1 agriculture enough to shut the gates of fields with cattle in them and not to trample on growing crops1 sanitation enough not to defile its haunts1 and religion enough to have some idea of why it is allowed its rights and why it must respect the rights of others4 ,and the rest of its education must consist of anything else it can pick up2 for beyond this society cannot go with any certainty1 and indeed can only go this far rather apologetically and provisionally1 as doing the best it can on very uncertain ground4 ,should ,children ,earn their ,living8 ,now comes the question how far children should be asked to contribute to the support of the community4 ,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 system4 ,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 generation1 as they began by doing until they were restrained by law at the suggestion of ,robert ,owen1 the founder of ,english ,socialism4 ,most of this legislation will become an insufferable restraint upon freedom and variety of action when ,capitalism goes the way of ,druidic human sacrifice 7a much less slaughterous institution74 ,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 future2 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 it4 ,children's ,happiness ,also it is important to put the happiness of the children rather carefully in its place1 which is really not a front place4 ,the unsympathetic1 selfish1 hard people who regard happiness as a very exceptional indulgence to which children are by no means entitled1 though they may be allowed a very little of it on their birthdays or at ,christmas1 are sometimes better parents in effect than those who imagine that children are as capable of happiness as adults4 ,adults habitually exaggerate their own capacity in that direction grossly2 yet most adults can stand an allowance of happiness that would be quite thrown away on children4 ,the secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not4 ,the cure for it is occupation1 because occupation means pre-occupation2 and the pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy1 but simply alive and active1 which is pleasanter than any happiness until you are tired of it4 ,that is why it is necessary to happiness that one should be tired4 ,music after dinner is pleasant3 music before breakfast is so unpleasant as to be clearly unnatural4 ,to people who are not overworked holidays are a nuisance4 ,to people who are1 and who can afford them1 they are a troublesome necessity4 ,a perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell4 ,the ,horror of the ,perpetual ,holiday ,it will be said here that1 on the contrary1 heaven is always conceived as a perpetual holiday1 and that whoever is not born to an independent income is striving for one or longing for one because it gives holidays for life4 ,to which ,i reply1 first1 that heaven1 as conventionally conceived1 is a place so inane1 so dull1 so useless1 so miserable1 that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven1 though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside2 and that the genuine popular verdict on it is expressed in the proverb ,heaven for holiness and ,hell for company4 ,second1 ,i point out that the wretched people who have independent incomes and no useful occupation1 do the most amazingly disagreeable and dangerous things to make themselves tired and hungry in the evening4 ,when they are not involved in what they call sport1 they are doing aimlessly what other people have to be paid to do3 driving horses and motor cars2 trying on dresses and walking up and down to shew them off2 and acting as footmen and housemaids to royal personages4 ,the sole and obvious cause of the notion that idleness is delightful and that heaven is a place where there is nothing to be done1 is our school system and our industrial system4 ,the school is a prison in which work is a punishment and a curse4 ,in avowed prisons1 hard labor1 the only alleviation of a prisoner's lot1 is treated as an aggravation of his punishment2 and everything possible is done to intensify the prisoner's inculcated and unnatural notion that work is an evil4 ,in industry we are overworked and underfed prisoners4 ,under such absurd circumstances our judgment of things becomes as perverted as our habits4 ,if we were habitually underworked and overfed1 our notion of heaven would be a place where everybody worked strenuously for twenty-four hours a day and never got anything to eat4 ,once realize that a perpetual holiday is beyond human endurance1 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 children4 ,if we did1 they would soon outdo the ,labor ,party in their claim for a ,right to ,work ,bill4 ,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 papa4 ,loathsome as we have made the idea of duty 7like the idea of work7 we must habituate children to a sense of repayable obligation to the community for what they consume and enjoy1 and inculcate the repayment as a point of honor4 ,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 rich1 since there is no distinction in being rich if you have to pay scot and lot in personal effort like the working folk4 ,therefore1 if for only half an hour a day1 a child should do something serviceable to the community4 ,productive work for children has the advantage that its discipline is the discipline of impersonal necessity1 not that of wanton personal coercion4 ,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 factory1 nor altogether by the temptation of wages1 nor even by the desire for novelty1 but by the dignity of adult work1 the exchange of the factitious personal tyranny of the schoolmaster1 from which the grown-ups are free1 for the stern but entirely dignified ,laws of ,life to which all flesh is subject4 ,university ,schoolboyishness ,older children might do a good deal before beginning their collegiate education4 ,what is the matter with our universities is that all the students are schoolboys1 whereas it is of the very essence of university education that they should be men4 ,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 gramophones4 ,we go to them to be socialized2 to acquire the hall mark of communal training2 to become citizens of the world instead of inmates of the enlarged rabbit hutches we call homes2 to learn manners and become unchallengeable ladies and gentlemen4 ,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 community1 not that of a barbarous rabble of half emancipated schoolboys and unemancipable pedants4 ,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 all4 ,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 of1 not as solitary students reading in seclusion1 but as members of a body of individuals all pursuing culture1 talking culture1 thinking culture1 above all1 criticizing culture4 ,if such persons are to read and talk and criticize to any purpose1 they must know the world outside the university at least as well as the shopkeeper in the ,high ,street does4 ,and this is just what they do not know at present4 ,you may say of them1 paraphrasing ,mr4 ,kipling1 ,what do they know of ,plato that only ,plato know8 ,if our universities would exclude everybody who had not earned a living by his or her own exertions for at least a couple of years1 their effect would be vastly improved4 ,the ,new ,laziness ,the child of the future1 then1 if there is to be any future but one of decay1 will work more or less for its living from an early age2 and in doing so it will not shock anyone1 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 offices4 ,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 7it is retinue that eats up the big income7 without working too hard or too long for quite as much happiness as they can enjoy4 ,the question to be balanced then will be1 not how soon people should be put to work1 but how soon they should be released from any obligation of the kind4 ,a life's work is like a day's work3 it can begin early and leave off early or begin late and leave off late1 or1 as with us1 begin too early and never leave off at all1 obviously the worst of all possible plans4 ,in any event we must finally reckon work1 not as the curse our schools and prisons and capitalist profit factories make it seem today1 but as a prime necessity of a tolerable existence4 ,and if we cannot devise fresh wants as fast as we develop the means of supplying them1 there will come a scarcity of the needed1 cut-and-dried1 appointed work that is always ready to everybody's hand4 ,it may have to be shared out among people all of whom want more of it4 ,and then a new sort of laziness will become the bugbear of society3 the laziness that refuses to face the mental toil and adventure of making work by inventing new ideas or extending the domain of knowledge1 and insists on a ready-made routine4 ,it may come to forcing people to retire before they are willing to make way for younger ones3 that is1 to driving all persons of a certain age out of industry1 leaving them to find something experimental to occupy them on pain of perpetual holiday4 ,men will then try to spend twenty thousand a year for the sake of having to earn it4 ,instead of being what we are now1 the cheapest and nastiest of the animals1 we shall be the costliest1 most fastidious1 and best bred4 ,in short1 there is no end to the astonishing things that may happen when the curse of ,adam becomes first a blessing and then an incurable habit4 ,and in that day we must not grudge children their share of it4 ,the ,infinite ,school ,task ,the question of children's work1 however1 is only a question of what the child ought to do for the community4 ,how highly it should qualify itself is another matter4 ,but most of the difficulty of inducing children to learn would disappear if our demands became not only definite but finite4 ,when learning is only an excuse for imprisonment1 it is an instrument of torture which becomes more painful the more progress is made4 ,thus when you have forced a child to learn the ,church ,catechism1 a document profound beyond the comprehension of most adults1 you are sometimes at a standstill for something else to teach2 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 verses1 preferably from the book of ,numbers4 ,but as it is less trouble to set a lesson that you know yourself1 there is a tendency to keep repeating the already learnt lesson rather than break new ground4 ,at school ,i began with a fairly complete knowledge of ,latin grammar in the childish sense of being able to repeat all the paradigms2 and ,i was kept at this1 or rather kept in a class where the master never asked me to do it because he knew ,i could1 and therefore devoted himself to trapping the boys who could not1 until ,i finally forgot most of it4 ,but when progress took place1 what did it mean8 ,first it meant ,caesar1 with the foreknowledge that to master ,caesar meant only being set at ,virgil1 with the culminating horror of ,greek and ,homer in reserve at the end of that4 ,i preferred ,caesar1 because his statement that ,gaul is divided into three parts1 though neither interesting nor true1 was the only ,latin sentence ,i could translate at sight3 therefore the longer we stuck at ,caesar the better ,i was pleased4 ,just so do less classically educated children see nothing in the mastery of addition but the beginning of subtraction1 and so on through multiplication and division and fractions1 with the black cloud of algebra on the horizon4 ,and if a boy rushes through all that1 there is always the calculus to fall back on1 unless indeed you insist on his learning music1 and proceed to hit him if he cannot tell you the year ,beethoven was born4 ,a child has a right to finality as regards its compulsory lessons4 ,also as regards physical training4 ,at present it is assumed that the schoolmaster has a right to force every child into an attempt to become ,porson and ,bentley1 ,leibnitz and ,newton1 all rolled into one4 ,this is the tradition of the oldest grammar schools4 ,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 sleep4 ,this is supposed to protect them from vice2 but as it also protects them from poetry1 literature1 music1 meditation and prayer1 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 happen1 then the sooner boarding schools are violently abolished the better4 ,it is true that society may make physical claims on the child as well as mental ones3 the child must learn to walk1 to use a knife and fork1 to swim1 to ride a bicycle1 to acquire sufficient power of self-defence to make an attack on it an arduous and uncertain enterprise1 perhaps to fly4 ,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 ,sandow4 ,the ,rewards and ,risks of ,knowledge ,in a word1 we have no right to insist on educating a child2 for its education can end only with its life and will not even then be complete4 ,compulsory completion of education is the last folly of a rotten and desperate civilization4 ,it is the rattle in its throat before dissolution4 ,all we can fairly do is to prescribe certain definite acquirements and accomplishments as qualifications for certain employments2 and to secure them1 not by the ridiculous method of inflicting injuries on the persons who have not yet mastered them1 but by attaching certain privileges 7not pecuniary7 to the employments4 ,most acquirements carry their own privileges with them4 ,thus a baby has to be pretty closely guarded and imprisoned because it cannot take care of itself4 ,it has even to be carried about 7the most complete conceivable infringement of its liberty7 until it can walk4 ,but nobody goes on carrying children after they can walk lest they should walk into mischief1 though ,arab boys make their sisters carry them1 as our own spoiled children sometimes make their nurses1 out of mere laziness1 because sisters in the ,east and nurses in the ,west are kept in servitude4 ,but in a society of equals 7the only reasonable and permanently possible sort of society7 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 walk4 ,anyhow1 freedom of movement in a nursery is the reward of learning to walk2 and in precisely the same way freedom of movement in a city is the reward of learning how to read public notices1 and to count and use money4 ,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 train4 ,when you enable a child to read these1 you also enable it to read this preface1 to the utter destruction1 you may quite possibly think1 of its morals and docility4 ,you also expose it to the danger of being run over by taxicabs and trains4 ,the moral and physical risks of education are enormous3 every new power a child acquires1 from speaking1 walking1 and co-ordinating its vision1 to conquering continents and founding religions1 opens up immense new possibilities of mischief4 ,teach a child to write and you teach it how to forge3 teach it to speak and you teach it how to lie3 teach it to walk and you teach it how to kick its mother to death4 ,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 servitude2 and this problem is fortunately not completely soluble2 for it is not in fact found possible for a duke to treat his solicitor or his doctor as he treats his laborers1 though they are all equally his slaves3 the laborer being in fact less dependent on his favor than the professional man4 ,hence it is that men come to resent1 of all things1 protection1 because it so often means restriction of their liberty lest they should make a bad use of it4 ,if there are dangerous precipices about1 it is much easier and cheaper to forbid people to walk near the edge than to put up an effective fence3 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 risk4 ,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 ones4 ,i can remember a relative of mine who1 when ,i was a small child1 unused to horses and very much afraid of them1 insisted on putting me on a rather rumbustious pony with little spurs on my heels 7knowing that in my agitation ,i would use them unconsciously71 and being enormously amused at my terrors4 ,yet when that same lady discovered that ,i had found a copy of ,the ,arabian ,nights and was devouring it with avidity1 she was horrified1 and hid it away from me lest it should break my soul as the pony might have broken my neck4 ,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 bones1 broken backs1 and broken necks without coming upon a single spiritual adventure or daring thought4 ,but whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them4 ,a man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free at all2 and the right to liberty begins1 not at the age of #ba years but of #ba seconds4 ,the ,risks of ,ignorance and ,weakness ,the difficulty with children is that they need protection from risks they are too young to understand1 and attacks they can neither avoid nor resist4 ,you may on academic grounds allow a child to snatch glowing coals from the fire once4 ,you will not do it twice4 ,the risks of liberty we must let everyone take2 but the risks of ignorance and self-helplessness are another matter4 ,not only children but adults need protection from them4 ,at present adults are often exposed to risks outside their knowledge or beyond their comprehension or powers of resistance or foresight3 for example1 we have to look on every day at marriages or financial speculations that may involve far worse consequences than burnt fingers4 ,and just as it is part of the business of adults to protect children1 to feed them1 clothe them1 shelter them1 and shift for them in all sorts of ways until they are able to shift for themselves1 it is coming more and more to be seen that this is true not only of the relation between adults and children1 but between adults and adults4 ,we shall not always look on indifferently at foolish marriages and financial speculations1 nor allow dead men to control live communities by ridiculous wills and living heirs to squander and ruin great estates1 nor tolerate a hundred other absurd liberties that we allow today because we are too lazy to find out the proper way to interfere4 ,but the interference must be regulated by some theory of the individual's rights4 ,though the right to live is absolute1 it is not unconditional4 ,if a man is unbearably mischievous1 he must be killed4 ,this is a mere matter of necessity1 like the killing of a man-eating tiger in a nursery1 a venomous snake in the garden1 or a fox in the poultry yard4 ,no society could be constructed on the assumption that such extermination is a violation of the creature's right to live1 and therefore must not be allowed4 ,and then at once arises the danger into which morality has led us3 the danger of persecution4 ,one ,christian spreading his doctrines may seem more mischievous than a dozen thieves3 throw him therefore to the lions4 ,a lying or disobedient child may corrupt a whole generation and make human ,society impossible3 therefore thrash the vice out of him4 ,and so on until our whole system of abortion1 intimidation1 tyranny1 cruelty and the rest is in full swing again4 ,the ,common ,sense of ,toleration ,the real safeguard against this is the dogma of ,toleration4 ,i need not here repeat the compact treatise on it which ,i prepared for the ,joint ,committee on the ,censorship of ,stage ,plays1 and prefixed to ,the ,shewing ,up of ,blanco ,posnet4 ,it must suffice now to say that the present must not attempt to schoolmaster the future by pretending to know good from evil in tendency1 or protect citizens against shocks to their opinions and convictions1 moral1 political or religious3 in other words it must not persecute doctrines of any kind1 or what is called bad taste1 and must insist on all persons facing such shocks as they face frosty weather or any of the other disagreeable1 dangerous1 or bracing incidents of freedom4 ,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 seditious1 blasphemous1 and immoral1 and which deeply shock people who never think originally1 thought being with them merely a habit and an echo4 ,the deeper ground for ,toleration is the nature of creation1 which1 as we now know1 proceeds by evolution4 ,evolution finds its way by experiment2 and this finding of the way varies according to the stage of development reached1 from the blindest groping along the line of least resistance to intellectual speculation1 with its practical sequel of hypothesis and experimental verification2 or to observation1 induction1 and deduction2 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 prophet4 ,here the law for the child is the same as for the adult4 ,the high priest must not rend his garments and cry ,crucify him when he is shocked3 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 miserable4 ,it1 and the ,sermon on the ,mount1 and ,machiavelli's ,prince1 and ,la ,rochefoucauld's maxims1 and ,hymns ,ancient and ,modern1 and ,de ,glanville's apologue1 and ,dr4 ,watts's rhymes1 and ,nietzsche's ,gay ,science1 and ,ingersoll's ,mistakes of ,moses1 and the speeches and pamphlets of the people who want us to make war on ,germany1 and the ,noodle's ,orations and articles of our politicians and journalists1 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 wisdom4 ,however terrible the wounds suffered in that conflict1 they are better than the barren peace of death that follows when all the combatants are slaughtered or bound hand and foot4 ,the difficulty at present is that though this necessity for ,toleration is a law of political science as well established as the law of gravitation1 our rulers are never taught political science3 on the contrary1 they are taught in school that the master tolerates nothing that is disagreeable to him2 that ruling is simply being master2 and that the master's method is the method of violent punishment4 ,and our citizens1 all school taught1 are walking in the same darkness4 ,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 townsmen4 ,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 government1 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 him4 ,in a word1 he is not a politician1 but a grown-up schoolboy who has at last got a cane in his hand4 ,and as all the rest of us are in the same condition 7except as to command of the cane7 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 people4 ,the ,sin of ,athanasius ,it seems hopeless4 ,anarchists are tempted to preach a violent and implacable resistance to all law as the only remedy2 and the result of that speedily is that people welcome any tyranny that will rescue them from chaos4 ,but there is really no need to choose between anarchy and tyranny4 ,a quite reasonable state of things is practicable if we proceed on human assumptions and not on academic ones4 ,if adults will frankly give up their claim to know better than children what the purposes of the ,life ,force are1 and treat the child as an experiment like themselves1 and possibly a more successful one1 and at the same time relinquish their monstrous parental claims to personal private property in children1 the rest must be left to common sense4 ,it is our attitude1 our religion1 that is wrong4 ,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 ,god1 or as absolutely right1 should be dealt with as a blasphemer3 as1 indeed1 guilty of the unpardonable sin against the ,holy ,ghost4 ,if the penalty were death1 it would rid us at once of that scourge of humanity1 the amateur ,pope4 ,as an ,irish ,protestant1 ,i raise the cry of ,no ,popery with hereditary zest4 ,we are overrun with ,popes4 ,from curates and governesses1 who may claim a sort of professional standing1 to parents and uncles and nurserymaids and school teachers and wiseacres generally1 there are scores of thousands of human insects groping through our darkness by the feeble phosphorescence of their own tails1 yet ready at a moment's notice to reveal the will of ,god on every possible subject2 to explain how and why the universe was made 7in my youth they added the exact date7 and the circumstances under which it will cease to exist2 to lay down precise rules of right and wrong conduct2 to discriminate infallibly between virtuous and vicious character2 and all this with such certainty that they are prepared to visit all the rigors of the law1 and all the ruinous penalties of social ostracism on people1 however harmless their actions maybe who venture to laugh at their monstrous conceit or to pay their assumptions the extravagant compliment of criticizing them4 ,as to children1 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 ,solon8 ,it is this ignorant uppishness that does the mischief4 ,a stranger on the planet might expect that its grotesque absurdity would provoke enough ridicule to cure it2 but unfortunately quite the contrary happens4 ,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 daily1 so our ignorance and helplessness set us clamoring for spiritual and moral quacks who pretend that they can save our souls from their own damnation4 ,if a doctor were to say to his patients1 ,i am familiar with your symptoms1 because ,i have seen other people in your condition2 and ,i will bring the very little knowledge we have to your treatment2 but except in that very shallow sense ,i dont know what is the matter with you2 and ,i cant undertake to cure you1 he would be a lost man professionally2 and if a clergyman1 on being called on to award a prize for good conduct in the village school1 were to say1 ,i am afraid ,i cannot say who is the best-behaved child1 because ,i really do not know what good conduct is2 but ,i will gladly take the teacher's word as to which child has caused least inconvenience1 he would probably be unfrocked1 if not excommunicated4 ,and yet no honest and intellectually capable doctor or parson can say more4 ,clearly it would not be wise of the doctor to say it1 because optimistic lies have such immense therapeutic value that a doctor who cannot tell them convincingly has mistaken his profession4 ,and a clergyman who is not prepared to lay down the law dogmatically will not be of much use in a village school1 though it behoves him all the more to be very careful what law he lays down4 ,but unless both the clergyman and the doctor are in the attitude expressed by these speeches they are not fit for their work4 ,the man who believes that he has more than a provisional hypothesis to go upon is a born fool4 ,he may have to act vigorously on it4 ,the world has no use for the ,agnostic who wont believe anything because anything might be false1 and wont deny anything because anything might be true4 ,but there is a wide difference between saying1 ,i believe this2 and ,i am going to act on it1 or1 ,i dont believe it2 and ,i wont act on it1 and saying1 ,it is true2 and it is my duty and yours to act on it1 or1 ,it is false2 and it is my duty and yours to refuse to act on it4 ,the difference is as great as that between the ,apostles' ,creed and the ,athanasian ,creed4 ,when you repeat the ,apostles' ,creed you affirm that you believe certain things4 ,there you are clearly within your rights4 ,when you repeat the ,athanasian ,creed1 you affirm that certain things are so1 and that anybody who doubts that they are so cannot be saved4 ,and this is simply a piece of impudence on your part1 as you know nothing about it except that as good men as you have never heard of your creed4 ,the apostolic attitude is a desire to convert others to our beliefs for the sake of sympathy and light3 the ,athanasian attitude is a desire to murder people who dont agree with us4 ,i am sufficient of an ,athanasian to advocate a law for the speedy execution of all ,athanasians1 because they violate the fundamental proposition of my creed1 which is1 ,i repeat1 that all living creatures are experiments4 ,the precise formula for the ,superman1 ci-devant ,the ,just ,man ,made ,perfect1 has not yet been discovered4 ,until it is1 every birth is an experiment in the ,great ,research which is being conducted by the ,life ,force to discover that formula4 ,the ,experiment ,experimenting ,and now all the modern schoolmaster abortionists will rise up beaming1 and say1 ,we quite agree4 ,we regard every child in our school as a subject for experiment4 ,we are always experimenting with them4 ,we challenge the experimental test for our system4 ,we are continually guided by our experience in our great work of moulding the character of our future citizens1 etc4 etc4 etc4 ,i am sorry to seem irreconcilable2 but it is the ,life ,force that has to make the experiment and not the schoolmaster2 and the ,life ,force for the child's purpose is in the child and not in the schoolmaster4 ,the schoolmaster is another experiment2 and a laboratory in which all the experiments began experimenting on one another would not produce intelligible results4 ,i admit1 however1 that if my schoolmasters had treated me as an experiment of the ,life ,force3 that is1 if they had set me free to do as ,i liked subject only to my political rights and theirs1 they could not have watched the experiment very long1 because the first result would have been a rapid movement on my part in the direction of the door1 and my disappearance there-through4 ,it may be worth inquiring where ,i should have gone to4 ,i should say that practically every time ,i should have gone to a much more educational place4 ,i should have gone into the country1 or into the sea1 or into the ,national ,gallery1 or to hear a band if there was one1 or to any library where there were no schoolbooks4 ,i should have read very dry and difficult books3 for example1 though nothing would have induced me to read the budget of stupid party lies that served as a text-book of history in school1 ,i remember reading ,robertson's ,charles ,v4 and his history of ,scotland from end to end most laboriously4 ,once1 stung by the airs of a schoolfellow who alleged that he had read ,locke ,on ,the ,human ,understanding1 ,i attempted to read the ,bible straight through1 and actually got to the ,pauline ,epistles before ,i broke down in disgust at what seemed to me their inveterate crookedness of mind4 ,if there had been a school where children were really free1 ,i should have had to be driven out of it for the sake of my health by the teachers2 for the children to whom a literary education can be of any use are insatiable3 they will read and study far more than is good for them4 ,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 studying1 instead of taking some trouble to find out what they really like and are capable of doing some good at4 ,some silly person will probably interrupt me here with the remark that many children have no appetite for a literary education at all1 and would never open a book if they were not forced to4 ,i have known many such persons who have been forced to the point of obtaining ,university degrees4 ,and for all the effect their literary exercises has left on them they might just as well have been put on the treadmill4 ,in fact they are actually less literate than the treadmill would have left them2 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 literature4 ,i should probably know as much ,latin as ,french1 if ,latin had not been made the excuse for my school imprisonment and degradation4 ,why ,we ,loathe ,learning and ,love ,sport ,if we are to discuss the importance of art1 learning1 and intellectual culture1 the first thing we have to recognize is that we have very little of them at present2 and that this little has not been produced by compulsory education3 nay1 that the scarcity is unnatural and has been produced by the violent exclusion of art and artists from schools4 ,on the other hand we have quite a considerable degree of bodily culture3 indeed there is a continual outcry against the sacrifice of mental accomplishments to athletics4 ,in other words a sacrifice of the professed object of compulsory education to the real object of voluntary education4 ,it is assumed that this means that people prefer bodily to mental culture2 but may it not mean that they prefer liberty and satisfaction to coercion and privation4 ,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 school1 whereas there is still1 #cjj years after his death1 a wide and steady sale for his works to people who read his plays as plays1 and not as task work8 ,if ,shakespear1 or for that matter1 ,newton and ,leibnitz1 are allowed to find their readers and students they will find them4 ,if their works are annotated and paraphrased by dullards1 and the annotations and paraphrases forced on all young people by imprisonment and flogging and scolding1 there will not be a single man of letters or higher mathematician the more in the country3 on the contrary there will be less1 as so many potential lovers of literature and mathematics will have been incurably prejudiced against them4 ,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 sham2 that it knows little about literature or art and a great deal about point-to-point races2 and that the village cobbler1 who has never read a page of ,plato1 and is admittedly a dangerously ignorant man politically1 is nevertheless a ,socrates compared to the classically educated gentlemen who discuss politics in country houses at election time 7and at no other time7 after their day's earnest and skilful shooting4 ,think of the years and years of weary torment the women of the piano-possessing class have been forced to spend over the keyboard1 fingering scales4 ,how many of them could be bribed to attend a pianoforte recital by a great player1 though they will rise from sick beds rather than miss ,ascot or ,goodwood8 ,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 books1 though their education in simple arithmetic was compulsory1 whereas their higher education has been wholly voluntary4 ,everywhere we find the same result4 ,the imprisonment1 the beating1 the taming and laming1 the breaking of young spirits1 the arrest of development1 the atrophy of all inhibitive power except the power of fear1 are real3 the education is sham4 ,those who have been taught most know least4 ,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 ,christianity4 ,christ stands in the world for that intuition of the highest humanity that we1 being members one of another1 must not complain1 must not scold1 must not strike1 nor revile nor persecute nor revenge nor punish4 ,now family life and school life are1 as far as the moral training of children is concerned1 nothing but the deliberate inculcation of a routine of complaint1 scolding1 punishment1 persecution1 and revenge as the natural and only possible way of dealing with evil or inconvenience4 ,aint nobody to be whopped for this here8 exclaimed ,sam ,weller when he saw his employer's name written up on a stage coach1 and conceived the phenomenon as an insult which reflected on himself4 ,this exclamation of ,sam ,weller is at once the negation of ,christianity and the beginning and the end of current morality2 and so it will remain as long as the family and the school persist as we know them3 that is1 as long as the rights of children are so utterly denied that nobody will even take the trouble to ascertain what they are1 and coming of age is like the turning of a convict into the street after twenty-one years penal servitude4 ,indeed it is worse2 for the convict may have learnt before his conviction how to live in freedom and may remember how to set about it1 however lamed his powers of freedom may have become through disuse2 but the child knows no other way of life but the slave's way4 ,born free1 as ,rousseau says1 he has been laid hands on by slaves from the moment of his birth and brought up as a slave4 ,how is he1 when he is at last set free1 to be anything else than the slave he actually is1 clamoring for war1 for the lash1 for police1 prisons1 and scaffolds in a wild panic of delusion that without these things he is lost4 ,the grown-up ,englishman is to the end of his days a badly brought-up child1 beyond belief quarrelsome1 petulant1 selfish1 destructive1 and cowardly3 afraid that the ,germans will come and enslave him2 that the burglar will come and rob him2 that the bicycle or motor car will run over him2 that the smallpox will attack him2 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 away4 ,and this ,englishman1 without the moral courage of a louse1 will risk his neck for fun fifty times every winter in the hunting field1 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 honor4 ,as a ,sportsman 7and war is fundamentally the sport of hunting and fighting the most dangerous of the beasts of prey7 he feels free4 ,he will tell you himself that the true sportsman is never a snob1 a coward1 a duffer1 a cheat1 a thief1 or a liar4 ,curious1 is it not1 that he has not the same confidence in other sorts of man8 ,and even sport is losing its freedom4 ,soon everybody will be schooled1 mentally and physically1 from the cradle to the end of the term of adult compulsory military service1 and finally of compulsory civil service lasting until the age of superannuation4 ,always more schooling1 more compulsion4 ,we are to be cured by an excess of the dose that has poisoned us4 ,satan is to cast out ,satan4 ,under the ,whip ,clearly this will not do4 ,we must reconcile education with liberty4 ,we must find out some means of making men workers and1 if need be1 warriors1 without making them slaves4 ,we must cultivate the noble virtues that have their root in pride4 ,now no schoolmaster will teach these any more than a prison governor will teach his prisoners how to mutiny and escape4 ,self-preservation forces him to break the spirit that revolts against him1 and to inculcate submission1 even to obscene assault1 as a duty4 ,a bishop once had the hardihood to say that he would rather see ,england free than ,england sober4 ,nobody has yet dared to say that he would rather see an ,england of ignoramuses than an ,england of cowards and slaves4 ,and if anyone did1 it would be necessary to point out that the antithesis is not a practical one1 as we have got at present an ,england of ignoramuses who are also cowards and slaves1 and extremely proud of it at that1 because in school they are taught to submit1 with what they ridiculously call ,oriental fatalism 7as if any ,oriental has ever submitted more helplessly and sheepishly to robbery and oppression than we ,occidentals do71 to be driven day after day into compounds and set to the tasks they loathe by the men they hate and fear1 as if this were the inevitable destiny of mankind4 ,and naturally1 when they grow up1 they helplessly exchange the prison of the school for the prison of the mine or the workshop or the office1 and drudge along stupidly and miserably1 with just enough gregarious instinct to turn furiously on any intelligent person who proposes a change4 ,it would be quite easy to make ,england a paradise1 according to our present ideas1 in a few years4 ,there is no mystery about it3 the way has been pointed out over and over again4 ,the difficulty is not the way but the will4 ,and we have no will because the first thing done with us in childhood was to break our will4 ,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 ,eton1 two of his schoolfellows being compelled to hold him down whilst he was flogged4 ,not long ago a public body in ,england had to deal with the case of a schoolmaster who1 conceiving himself insulted by the smoking of a cigaret against his orders by a pupil eighteen years old1 proposed to flog him publicly as a satisfaction to what he called his honor and authority4 ,i had intended to give the particulars of this ease1 but find the drudgery of repeating such stuff too sickening1 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 education4 ,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 character1 and had his claim allowed4 ,in ,japan he would hardly have been allowed the privilege of committing suicide4 ,what is to be said of a profession in which such obscenities are made points of honor1 or of institutions in which they are an accepted part of the daily routine8 ,wholesome people would not argue about the taste of such nastinesses3 they would spit them out2 but we are tainted with flagellomania from our childhood4 ,when will we realize that the fact that we can become accustomed to anything1 however disgusting at first1 makes it necessary for us to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to8 ,before motor cars became common1 necessity had accustomed us to a foulness in our streets which would have horrified us had the street been our drawing-room carpet4 ,before long we shall be as particular about our streets as we now are about our carpets2 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 century4 ,this foulness1 we can plead1 was imposed on us as a necessity by the use of horses and of huge retinues2 but flogging has never been so imposed3 it has always been a vice1 craved for on any pretext by those depraved by it4 ,boys were flogged when criminals were hanged1 to impress the awful warning on them4 ,boys were flogged at boundaries1 to impress the boundaries on their memory4 ,other methods and other punishments were always available3 the choice of this one betrayed the sensual impulse which makes the practice an abomination4 ,but when its viciousness made it customary1 it was practised and tolerated on all hands by people who were innocent of anything worse than stupidity1 ill temper1 and inability to discover other methods of maintaining order than those they had always seen practised and approved of4 ,from children and animals it extended to slaves and criminals4 ,in the days of ,moses it was limited to #ci lashes4 ,in the early nineteenth century it had become an open madness3 soldiers were sentenced to a thousand lashes for trifling offences1 with the result 7among others less mentionable7 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 regiments4 ,such frantic excesses of this disgusting neurosis provoked a reaction against it2 but the clamor for it by depraved persons never ceased1 and was tolerated by a nation trained to it from childhood in the schools until last year 7#aiac71 when in what must be described as a paroxysm of sexual excitement provoked by the agitation concerning the ,white ,slave ,traffic 7the purely commercial nature of which ,i was prevented from exposing on the stage by the ,censorship twenty years ago7 the ,government yielded to an outcry for flagellation led by the ,archbishop of ,canterbury1 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 prescribe4 ,such an ,act is not a legislative phenomenon but a psychopathic one4 ,its effect on the ,white ,slave ,traffic was1 of course1 to distract public attention from its real cause and from the people who really profit by it to imaginary foreign scoundrels1 and to secure a monopoly of its organization for women4 ,and all this evil is made possible by the schoolmaster with his cane and birch1 by the parents getting rid as best they can of the nuisance of children making noise and mischief in the house1 and by the denial to children of the elementary rights of human beings4 ,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 race4 ,for men and women learnt thereby to enslave and break in their children by the same means4 ,these children1 grown up1 knew no other methods of training4 ,finally the evil that was done for gain by the greedy was refined on and done for pleasure by the lustful4 ,flogging has become a pleasure purchasable in our streets1 and inhibition a grown-up habit that children play at4 ,go and see what baby is doing2 and tell him he mustnt is the last word of the nursery2 and the grimmest aspect of it is that it was first formulated by a comic paper as a capital joke4 ,technical ,instruction ,technical instruction tempts to violence 7as a short cut7 more than liberal education4 ,the sailor in ,mr ,rudyard ,kipling's ,captains ,courageous1 teaching the boy the names of the ship's tackle with a rope's end1 does not disgust us as our schoolmasters do1 especially as the boy was a spoiled boy4 ,but an unspoiled boy would not have needed that drastic medicine4 ,technical training may be as tedious as learning to skate or to play the piano or violin2 but it is the price one must pay to achieve certain desirable results or necessary ends4 ,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 powers4 ,it would be monstrous even if it were true2 for there is no labor that might not be imposed on a child or an adult on the same pretext2 but as a glance at the average products of our public school and university education shews that it is not true1 it need not trouble us4 ,but it is a fact that ignorance of ,latin and ,greek and mathematics closes certain careers to men 7,i do not mean artificial1 unnecessary1 noxious careers like those of the commercial schoolmaster74 ,languages1 even dead ones1 have their uses2 and1 as it seems to many of us1 mathematics have their uses4 ,they will always be learned by people who want to learn them2 and people will always want to learn them as long as they are of any importance in life3 indeed the want will survive their importance3 superstition is nowhere stronger than in the field of obsolete acquirements4 ,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 work4 ,there is no harder schoolmaster than experience2 and yet experience fails to teach where there is no desire to learn4 ,still1 one must not begin to apply this generalization too early4 ,and this brings me to an important factor in the case3 the factor of evolution4 ,docility and ,dependence ,if anyone1 impressed by my view that the rights of a child are precisely those of an adult1 proceeds to treat a child as if it were an adult1 he 7or she7 will find that though the plan will work much better at some points than the usual plan1 at others it will not work at all2 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' children4 ,in dealing with children what is needed is not logic but sense4 ,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 it4 ,there is no logical reason why ,i1 who strongly object to an adult standing over a boy of ten with a ,latin grammar1 and saying1 you must learn this1 whether you want to or not1 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 manners1 and practice on his docility to make him learn them4 ,and there is no logical reason why ,i should do for a child a great many little offices1 some of them troublesome and disagreeable1 which ,i should not do for a boy twice its age1 or support a boy or girl when ,i would unhesitatingly throw an adult on his own resources4 ,but there are practical reasons1 and sensible reasons1 and affectionate reasons for all these illogicalities4 ,children do not want to be treated altogether as adults3 such treatment terrifies them and over-burdens them with responsibility4 ,in truth1 very few adults care to be called on for independence and originality3 they also are bewildered and terrified in the absence of precedents and precepts and commandments2 but modern ,democracy allows them a sanctioning and cancelling power if they are capable of using it1 which children are not4 ,to treat a child wholly as an adult would be to mock and destroy it4 ,infantile docility and juvenile dependence are1 like death1 a product of ,natural ,selection2 and though there is no viler crime than to abuse them1 yet there is no greater cruelty than to ignore them4 ,i have complained sufficiently of what ,i suffered through the process of assault1 imprisonment1 and compulsory lessons that taught me nothing1 which are called my schooling4 ,but ,i could say a good deal also about the things ,i was not taught and should have been taught1 not to mention the things ,i was allowed to do which ,i should not have been allowed to do4 ,i have no recollection of being taught to read or write2 so ,i presume ,i was born with both faculties2 but many people seem to have bitter recollections of being forced reluctantly to acquire them4 ,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 cry1 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 ignorance4 ,reading1 writing1 and enough arithmetic to use money honestly and accurately1 together with the rudiments of law and order1 become necessary conditions of a child's liberty before it can appreciate the importance of its liberty1 or foresee that these accomplishments are worth acquiring4 ,nature has provided for this by evolving the instinct of docility4 ,children are very docile3 they have a sound intuition that they must do what they are told or perish4 ,and adults have an intuition1 equally sound1 that they must take advantage of this docility to teach children how to live properly or the children will not survive4 ,the difficulty is to know where to stop4 ,to illustrate this1 let us consider the main danger of childish docility and parental officiousness4 ,the ,abuse of ,docility ,docility may survive as a lazy habit long after it has ceased to be a beneficial instinct4 ,if you catch a child when it is young enough to be instinctively docile1 and keep it in a condition of unremitted tutelage under the nurserymaid1 the governess1 the preparatory school1 the secondary school1 and the university1 until it is an adult1 you will produce1 not a self-reliant1 free1 fully matured human being1 but a grown-up schoolboy or schoolgirl1 capable of nothing in the way of original or independent action except outbursts of naughtiness in the women and blackguardism in the men4 ,that is exactly what we get at present in our rich and consequently governing classes3 they pass from juvenility to senility without ever touching maturity except in body4 ,the classes which cannot afford this sustained tutelage are notably more self-reliant and grown-up3 an office boy of fifteen is often more of a man than a university student of twenty4 ,unfortunately this precocity is disabled by poverty1 ignorance1 narrowness1 and a hideous power of living without art or love or beauty and being rather proud of it4 ,the poor never escape from servitude3 their docility is preserved by their slavery4 ,and so all become the prey of the greedy1 the selfish1 the domineering1 the unscrupulous1 the predatory4 ,if here and there an individual refuses to be docile1 ten docile persons will beat him or lock him up or shoot him or hang him at the bidding of his oppressors and their own4 ,the crux of the whole difficulty about parents1 schoolmasters1 priests1 absolute monarchs1 and despots of every sort1 is the tendency to abuse natural docility4 ,a nation should always be healthily rebellious2 but the king or prime minister has yet to be found who will make trouble by cultivating that side of the national spirit4 ,a child should begin to assert itself early1 and shift for itself more and more not only in washing and dressing itself1 but in opinions and conduct2 yet as nothing is so exasperating and so unlovable as an uppish child1 it is useless to expect parents and schoolmasters to inculcate this uppishness4 ,such unamiable precepts as ,always contradict an authoritative statement1 ,always return a blow1 ,never lose a chance of a good fight1 ,when you are scolded for a mistake ask the person who scolds you whether he or she supposes you did it on purpose1 and follow the question with a blow or an insult or some other unmistakable expression of resentment1 ,remember that the progress of the world depends on your knowing better than your elders1 are just as important as those of ,the ,sermon on the ,mount2 but no one has yet seen them written up in letters of gold in a schoolroom or nursery4 ,the child is taught to be kind1 to be respectful1 to be quiet1 not to answer back1 to be truthful when its elders want to find out anything from it1 to lie when the truth would shock or hurt its elders1 to be above all things obedient1 and to be seen and not heard4 ,here we have two sets of precepts1 each warranted to spoil a child hopelessly if the other be omitted4 ,unfortunately we do not allow fair play between them4 ,the rebellious1 intractable1 aggressive1 selfish set provoke a corrective resistance1 and do not pretend to high moral or religious sanctions2 and they are never urged by grown-up people on young people4 ,they are therefore more in danger of neglect or suppression than the other set1 which have all the adults1 all the laws1 all the religions on their side4 ,how is the child to be secured its due share of both bodies of doctrine8 ,the ,schoolboy and the ,homeboy ,in practice what happens is that parents notice that boys brought up at home become mollycoddles1 or prigs1 or duffers1 unable to take care of themselves4 ,they see that boys should learn to rough it a little and to mix with children of their own age4 ,this is natural enough4 ,when you have preached at and punished a boy until he is a moral cripple1 you are as much hampered by him as by a physical cripple2 and as you do not intend to have him on your hands all your life1 and are generally rather impatient for the day when he will earn his own living and leave you to attend to yourself1 you sooner or later begin to talk to him about the need for self-reliance1 learning to think1 and so forth1 with the result that your victim1 bewildered by your inconsistency1 concludes that there is no use trying to please you1 and falls into an attitude of sulky resentment4 ,which is an additional inducement to pack him off to school4 ,in school1 he finds himself in a dual world1 under two dispensations4 ,there is the world of the boys1 where the point of honor is to be untameable1 always ready to fight1 ruthless in taking the conceit out of anyone who ventures to give himself airs of superior knowledge or taste1 and generally to take ,lucifer for one's model4 ,and there is the world of the masters1 the world of discipline1 submission1 diligence1 obedience1 and continual and shameless assumption of moral and intellectual authority4 ,thus the schoolboy hears both sides1 and is so far better off than the homebred boy who hears only one4 ,but the two sides are not fairly presented4 ,they are presented as good and evil1 as vice and virtue1 as villainy and heroism4 ,the boy feels mean and cowardly when he obeys1 and selfish and rascally when he disobeys4 ,he looses his moral courage just as he comes to hate books and languages4 ,in the end1 ,john ,ruskin1 tied so close to his mother's apron-string that he did not escape even when he went to ,oxford1 and ,john ,stuart ,mill1 whose father ought to have been prosecuted for laying his son's childhood waste with lessons1 were superior1 as products of training1 to our schoolboys4 ,they were very conspicuously superior in moral courage2 and though they did not distinguish themselves at cricket and football1 they had quite as much physical hardihood as any civilized man needs4 ,but it is to be observed that ,ruskin's parents were wise people who gave ,john a full share in their own life1 and put up with his presence both at home and abroad when they must sometimes have been very weary of him2 and ,mill1 as it happens1 was deliberately educated to challenge all the most sacred institutions of his country4 ,the households they were brought up in were no more average households than a ,montessori school is an average school4 ,the ,comings of ,age of ,children ,all this inculcated adult docility1 which wrecks every civilization as it is wrecking ours1 is inhuman and unnatural4 ,we must reconsider our institution of the ,coming of ,age1 which is too late for some purposes1 and too early for others4 ,there should be a series of ,coming of ,ages for every individual4 ,the mammals have their first coming of age when they are weaned2 and it is noteworthy that this rather cruel and selfish operation on the part of the parent has to be performed resolutely1 with claws and teeth2 for your little mammal does not want to be weaned1 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 separation4 ,the same thing occurs with children3 they hang on to the mother's apron-string and the father's coat tails as long as they can1 often baffling those sensitive parents who know that children should think for themselves and fend for themselves1 but are too kind to throw them on their own resources with the ferocity of the domestic cat4 ,the child should have its first coming of age when it is weaned1 another when it can talk1 another when it can walk1 another when it can dress itself without assistance2 and when it can read1 write1 count money1 and pass an examination in going a simple errand involving a purchase and a journey by rail or other public method of locomotion1 it should have quite a majority4 ,at present the children of laborers are soon mobile and able to shift for themselves1 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 unprotected4 ,it is true that this is a superstition from the time when a retinue was part of the state of persons of quality1 and the unattended person was supposed to be a common person of no quality1 earning a living2 but this has now become so absurd that children and young women are no longer told why they are forbidden to go about alone1 and have to be persuaded that the streets are dangerous places1 which of course they are2 but people who are not educated to live dangerously have only half a life1 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 course4 ,the ,conflict of ,wills ,the world wags in spite of its schools and its families because both schools and families are mostly very largely anarchic3 parents and schoolmasters are good-natured or weak or lazy2 and children are docile and affectionate and very shortwinded in their fits of naughtiness2 and so most families slummock along and muddle through until the children cease to be children4 ,in the few cases when the parties are energetic and determined1 the child is crushed or the parent is reduced to a cipher1 as the case may be4 ,when the opposed forces are neither of them strong enough to annihilate the other1 there is serious trouble3 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 affection4 ,we even get tragedies2 for there is nothing so tragic to contemplate or so devastating to suffer as the oppression of will without conscience2 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 sake4 ,the strongest1 fiercest force in nature is human will4 ,it is the highest organization we know of the will that has created the whole universe4 ,now all honest civilization1 religion1 law1 and convention is an attempt to keep this force within beneficent bounds4 ,what corrupts civilization1 religion1 law1 and convention 7and they are at present pretty nearly as corrupt as they dare7 is the constant attempts made by the wills of individuals and classes to thwart the wills and enslave the powers of other individuals and classes4 ,the powers of the parent and the schoolmaster1 and of their public analogues the lawgiver and the judge1 become instruments of tyranny in the hands of those who are too narrow-minded to understand law and exercise judgment2 and in their hands 7with us they mostly fall into such hands7 law becomes tyranny4 ,and what is a tyrant8 ,quite simply a person who says to another person1 young or old1 ,you shall do as ,i tell you2 you shall make what ,i want2 you shall profess my creed2 you shall have no will of your own2 and your powers shall be at the disposal of my will4 ,it has come to this at last3 that the phrase she has a will of her own1 or he has a will of his own has come to denote a person of exceptional obstinacy and self-assertion4 ,and even persons of good natural disposition1 if brought up to expect such deference1 are roused to unreasoning fury1 and sometimes to the commission of atrocious crimes1 by the slightest challenge to their authority4 ,thus a laborer may be dirty1 drunken1 untruthful1 slothful1 untrustworthy in every way without exhausting the indulgence of the country house4 ,but let him dare to be disrespectful and he is a lost man1 though he be the cleanest1 soberest1 most diligent1 most veracious1 most trustworthy man in the county4 ,dickens's instinct for detecting social cankers never served him better than when he shewed us ,mrs ,heep teaching her son to be umble1 knowing that if he carried out that precept he might be pretty well anything else he liked4 ,the maintenance of deference to our wills becomes a mania which will carry the best of us to any extremity4 ,we will allow a village of ,egyptian fellaheen or ,indian tribesmen to live the lowest life they please among themselves without molestation2 but let one of them slay an ,englishman or even strike him on the strongest provocation1 and straightway we go stark mad1 burning and destroying1 shooting and shelling1 flogging and hanging1 if only such survivors as we may leave are thoroughly cowed in the presence of a man with a white face4 ,in the committee room of a local council or city corporation1 the humblest employees of the committee find defenders if they complain of harsh treatment4 ,gratuities are voted1 indulgences and holidays are pleaded for1 delinquencies are excused in the most sentimental manner provided only the employee1 however patent a hypocrite or incorrigible a slacker1 is hat in hand4 ,but let the most obvious measure of justice be demanded by the secretary of a ,trade ,union in terms which omit all expressions of subservience1 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 business4 ,the ,demagogue's ,opportunity ,and the employee has in him the same fierce impulse to impose his will without respect for the will of others4 ,democracy is in practice nothing but a device for cajoling from him the vote he refuses to arbitrary authority4 ,he will not vote for ,coriolanus2 but when an experienced demagogue comes along and says1 ,sir3 you are the dictator3 the voice of the people is the voice of ,god2 and ,i am only your very humble servant1 he says at once1 ,all right3 tell me what to dictate1 and is presently enslaved more effectually with his own silly consent than ,coriolanus would ever have enslaved him without asking his leave4 ,and the trick by which the demagogue defeats ,coriolanus is played on him in his turn by his inferiors4 ,everywhere we see the cunning succeeding in the world by seeking a rich or powerful master and practising on his lust for subservience4 ,the political adventurer who gets into parliament by offering himself to the poor voter1 not as his representative but as his will-less soulless delegate1 is himself the dupe of a clever wife who repudiates ,votes for ,women1 knowing well that whilst the man is master1 the man's mistress will rule4 ,uriah ,heep may be a crawling creature2 but his crawling takes him upstairs4 ,thus does the selfishness of the will turn on itself1 and obtain by flattery what it cannot seize by open force4 ,democracy becomes the latest trick of tyranny3 womanliness becomes the latest wile of prostitution4 ,between parent and child the same conflict wages and the same destruction of character ensues4 ,parents set themselves to bend the will of their children to their own--to break their stubborn spirit1 as they call it--with the ruthlessness of ,grand ,inquisitors4 ,cunning1 unscrupulous children learn all the arts of the sneak in circumventing tyranny3 children of better character are cruelly distressed and more or less lamed for life by it4 ,our ,quarrelsomeness ,as between adults1 we find a general quarrelsomeness which makes political reform as impossible to most ,englishmen as to hogs4 ,certain sections of the nation get cured of this disability4 ,university men1 sailors1 and politicians are comparatively free from it1 because the communal life of the ,university1 the fact that in a ship a man must either learn to consider others or else go overboard or into irons1 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 committee1 educate the will socially4 ,but no one who has ever had to guide a committee of ordinary private ,englishmen through their first attempts at collective action1 in committee or otherwise1 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 tyrannies1 and the absence of all teaching of self-respect and training in self-assertion4 ,bullied and ordered about1 the ,englishman obeys like a sheep1 evades like a knave1 or tries to murder his oppressor4 ,merely criticized or opposed in committee1 or invited to consider anybody's views but his own1 he feels personally insulted and wants to resign or leave the room unless he is apologized to4 ,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 infallible1 are pitiable as far as they are anything but ludicrous4 ,that is what comes of not being taught to consider other people's wills1 and left to submit to them or to over-ride them as if they were the winds and the weather4 ,such a state of mind is incompatible not only with the democratic introduction of high civilization1 but with the comprehension and maintenance of such civilized institutions as have been introduced by benevolent and intelligent despots and aristocrats4 ,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 plan1 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 schooldays1 must helplessly send their children to the very schools they themselves were sent to1 because there is no alternative except abandoning the children to undisciplined vagabondism4 ,man in society must do as everybody else does in his class3 only fools and romantic novices imagine that freedom is a mere matter of the readiness of the individual to snap his fingers at convention4 ,it is true that most of us live in a condition of quite unnecessary inhibition1 wearing ugly and uncomfortable clothes1 making ourselves and other people miserable by the heathen horrors of mourning1 staying away from the theatre because we cannot afford the stalls and are ashamed to go to the pit1 and in dozens of other ways enslaving ourselves when there are comfortable alternatives open to us without any real drawbacks4 ,the contemplation of these petty slaveries1 and of the triumphant ease with which sensible people throw them off1 creates an impression that if we only take ,johnson's advice to free our minds from cant1 we can achieve freedom4 ,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 it4 ,many people believed in secondary co-education 7boys and girls taught together7 before schools like ,bedales were founded3 indeed the practice was common enough in elementary schools and in ,scotland2 but their belief did not help them until ,bedales and ,st ,george's were organized2 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 age1 even if they could always afford the fees of these exceptional schools4 ,it may be edifying to tell a duke that our public schools are all wrong in their constitution and methods1 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 street2 but what are the duke and the coster to do8 ,neither of them has any effective choice in the matter3 their children must either go to the schools that are1 or to no school at all4 ,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 school1 and the coster knows that his son will become an illiterate hooligan if he is left to the streets1 there is no real alternative for either of them4 ,child life must be socially organized3 no parent1 rich or poor1 can choose institutions that do not exist2 and the private enterprise of individual school masters appealing to a group of well-to-do parents1 though it may shew what can be done by enthusiasts with new methods1 cannot touch the mass of our children4 ,for the average parent or child nothing is really available except the established practice2 and this is what makes it so important that the established practice should be a sound one1 and so useless for clever individuals to disparage it unless they can organize an alternative practice and make it1 too1 general4 ,the ,pursuit of ,manners ,if you cross-examine the duke and the coster1 you will find that they are not concerned for the scholastic attainments of their children4 ,ask the duke whether he could pass the standard examination of twelve-year-old children in elementary schools1 and he will admit1 with an entirely placid smile1 that he would almost certainly be ignominiously plucked4 ,and he is so little ashamed of or disadvantaged by his condition that he is not prepared to spend an hour in remedying it4 ,the coster may resent the inquiry instead of being amused by it2 but his answer1 if true1 will be the same4 ,what they both want for their children is the communal training1 the apprenticeship to society1 the lessons in holding one's own among people of all sorts with whom one is not1 as in the home1 on privileged terms4 ,these can be acquired only by mixing with the world1 no matter how wicked the world is4 ,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 ,conqueror2 but all parents are earnestly anxious about the manners of their children4 ,better ,claude ,duval than ,kaspar ,hauser4 ,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 behavior4 ,and peers who tell you that our public schools are rotten through and through1 and that our ,universities ought to be razed to the foundations1 send their sons to ,eton and ,oxford1 ,harrow and ,cambridge1 not only because there is nothing else to be done1 but because these places1 though they turn out blackguards and ignoramuses and boobies galore1 turn them out with the habits and manners of the society they belong to4 ,bad as those manners are in many respects1 they are better than no manners at all4 ,and no individual or family can possibly teach them4 ,they can be acquired only by living in an organized community in which they are traditional4 ,thus we see that there are reasons for the segregation of children even in families where the great reason3 namely1 that children are nuisances to adults1 does not press very hardly1 as1 for instance1 in the houses of the very poor1 who can send their children to play in the streets1 or the houses of the very rich1 which are so large that the children's quarters can be kept out of the parents' way like the servants' quarters4 ,not too much ,wind on the ,heath1 ,brother ,what1 then1 is to be done8 ,for the present1 unfortunately1 little except propagating the conception of ,children's ,rights4 ,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 community1 which must always consist of grown-up children4 ,yet economic equality1 like all simple and obvious arrangements1 seems impossible to people brought up as children are now4 ,still1 something can be done even within class limits4 ,large communities of children of the same class are possible today2 and voluntary organization of outdoor life for children has already begun in ,boy ,scouting and excursions of one kind or another4 ,the discovery that anything1 even school life1 is better for the child than home life1 will become an over-ridden hobby2 and we shall presently be told by our faddists that anything1 even camp life1 is better than school life4 ,some blundering beginnings of this are already perceptible4 ,there is a movement for making our ,british children into priggish little barefooted vagabonds1 all talking like that born fool ,george ,borrow1 and supposed to be splendidly healthy because they would die if they slept in rooms with the windows shut1 or perhaps even with a roof over their heads4 ,still1 this is a fairly healthy folly2 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 fences1 and to leave them unlocked when there are no growing crops to be damaged nor bulls to be encountered1 instead of1 as at present1 imprisoning the human race in dusty or muddy thoroughfares between walls of barbed wire4 ,the reaction against vagabondage will come from the children themselves4 ,for them freedom will not mean the expensive kind of savagery now called the simple life4 ,their natural disgust with the visions of cockney book fanciers blowing themselves out with the wind on the heath1 brother1 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 undertake1 or too strong to realize that what is freedom to them may be terror and bewilderment to others1 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 rights4 ,wanted3 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 speculate4 ,but if it could once be established that a child has an adult's ,right of ,egress from uncomfortable places and unpleasant company1 and there were children's lawyers to sue pedagogues and others for assault and imprisonment1 there would be an amazing change in the behavior of schoolmasters1 the quality of school books1 and the amenities of school life4 ,that ,consciousness of ,consent which1 even in its present delusive form1 has enabled ,democracy to oust tyrannical systems in spite of all its vulgarities and stupidities and rancors and ineptitudes and ignorances1 would operate as powerfully among children as it does now among grown-ups4 ,no doubt the pedagogue would promptly turn demagogue1 and woo his scholars by all the arts of demagogy2 but none of these arts can easily be so dishonorable or mischievous as the art of caning4 ,and1 after all1 if larger liberties are attached to the acquisition of knowledge1 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 mathematics1 it will learn the multiplication table1 which is more than it always does at present1 in spite of all the canings and keepings in4 ,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 ,learning1 cane in hand1 the danger will be precocity of the intellect1 which is just as undesirable as precocity of the emotions4 ,we still have a silly habit of talking and thinking as if intellect were a mechanical process and not a passion2 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 thereby2 in spite of ,dickens and his picture of little ,paul ,dombey dying of lessons1 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 capacity4 ,and this overwork is not all the effect of compulsion2 for the average schoolmaster does not compel his scholars to learn3 he only scolds and punishes them if they do not1 which is quite a different thing1 the net effect being that the school prisoners need not learn unless they like4 ,nay1 it is sometimes remarked that the school dunce--meaning the one who does not like--often turns out well afterwards1 as if idleness were a sign of ability and character4 ,a much more sensible explanation is that the so-called dunces are not exhausted before they begin the serious business of life4 ,it is said that boys will be boys2 and one can only add one wishes they would4 ,boys really want to be manly1 and are unfortunately encouraged thoughtlessly in this very dangerous and overstraining aspiration4 ,all the people who have really worked 7,herbert ,spencer for instance7 warn us against work as earnestly as some people warn us against drink4 ,when learning is placed on the voluntary footing of sport1 the teacher will find himself saying every day ,run away and play3 you have worked as much as is good for you4 ,trying to make children leave school will be like trying to make them go to bed2 and it will be necessary to surprise them with the idea that teaching is work1 and that the teacher is tired and must go play or rest or eat3 possibilities always concealed by that infamous humbug the current schoolmaster1 who achieves a spurious divinity and a witch doctor's authority by persuading children that he is not human1 just as ladies persuade them that they have no legs4 ,children and ,game3 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 children4 ,i have more than once thought of trying to introduce the shooting of children as a sport1 as the children would then be preserved very carefully for ten months in the year1 thereby reducing their death rate far more than the fusillades of the sportsmen during the other two would raise it4 ,at present the killing of a fox except by a pack of foxhounds is regarded with horror2 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 them4 ,it must be admitted that the foxes have the best of it2 and indeed a glance at our pheasants1 our deer1 and our children will convince the most sceptical that the children have decidedly the worst of it4 ,this much hope1 however1 can be extracted from the present state of things4 ,it is so fantastic1 so mad1 so apparently impossible1 that no scheme of reform need ever henceforth be discredited on the ground that it is fantastic or mad or apparently impossible4 ,it is the sensible schemes1 unfortunately1 that are hopeless in ,england4 ,therefore ,i have great hopes that my own views1 though fundamentally sensible1 can be made to appear fantastic enough to have a chance4 ,first1 then1 ,i lay it down as a prime condition of sane society1 obvious as such to anyone but an idiot1 that in any decent community1 children should find in every part of their native country1 food1 clothing1 lodging1 instruction1 and parental kindness for the asking4 ,for the matter of that1 so should adults2 but the two cases differ in that as these commodities do not grow on the bushes1 the adults cannot have them unless they themselves organize and provide the supply1 whereas the children must have them as if by magic1 with nothing to do but rub the lamp1 like ,aladdin1 and have their needs satisfied4 ,the ,parents' ,intolerable ,burden ,there is nothing new in this3 it is how children have always had and must always have their needs satisfied4 ,the parent has to play the part of ,aladdin's djinn2 and many a parent has sunk beneath the burden of this service4 ,all the novelty we need is to organize it so that instead of the individual child fastening like a parasite on its own particular parents1 the whole body of children should be thrown not only upon the whole body of parents1 but upon the celibates and childless as well1 whose present exemption from a full share in the social burden of children is obviously unjust and unwholesome4 ,today it is easy to find a widow who has at great cost to herself in pain1 danger1 and disablement1 borne six or eight children4 ,in the same town you will find rich bachelors and old maids1 and married couples with no children or with families voluntarily limited to two or three4 ,the eight children do not belong to the woman in any real or legal sense4 ,when she has reared them they pass away from her into the community as independent persons1 marrying strangers1 working for strangers1 spending on the community the life that has been built up at her expense4 ,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 well4 ,this is so far recognized that already the child finds1 wherever it goes1 a school for it1 and somebody to force it into the school2 and more and more these schools are being driven by the mere logic of facts to provide the children with meals1 with boots1 with spectacles1 with dentists and doctors4 ,in fact1 when the child's parents are destitute or not to be found1 bread1 lodging1 and clothing are provided4 ,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 vice2 but still the practice of keeping children barely alive at the charge of the community is established2 and there is no need for me to argue about it4 ,i propose only two extensions of the practice4 ,one is to provide for all the child's reasonable human wants1 on which point1 if you differ from me1 ,i shall take leave to say that you are socially a fool and personally an inhuman wretch4 ,the other is that these wants should be supplied in complete freedom from compulsory schooling or compulsory anything except restraint from crime1 though1 as they can be supplied only by social organization1 the child must be conscious of and subject to the conditions of that organization1 which may involve such portions of adult responsibility and duty as a child may be able to bear according to its age1 and which will in any case prevent it from forming the vagabond and anarchist habit of mind4 ,one more exception might be necessary3 compulsory freedom4 ,i am sure that a child should not be imprisoned in a school4 ,i am not so sure that it should not sometimes be driven out into the open--imprisoned in the woods and on the mountains1 as it were4 ,for there are frowsty children1 just as there are frowsty adults1 who dont want freedom4 ,this morbid result of over-domestication would1 let us hope1 soon disappear with its cause4 ,mobilization ,those who see no prospect held out to them by this except a country in which all the children shall be roaming savages1 should consider1 first1 whether their condition would be any worse than that of the little caged savages of today1 and second1 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 society4 ,my own observation leads me to believe that we are not half mobilized enough4 ,true1 ,i cannot deny that we are more mobile than we were4 ,you will still find in the home counties old men who have never been to ,london1 and who tell you that they once went to ,winchester or ,st ,albans much as if they had been to the ,south ,pole2 but they are not so common as the clerk who has been to ,paris or to ,lovely ,lucerne1 and who goes away somewhere when he has a holiday4 ,his grandfather never had a holiday1 and1 if he had1 would no more have dreamed of crossing the ,channel than of taking a box at the ,opera4 ,but with all allowance for the ,polytechnic excursion and the tourist agency1 our inertia is still appalling4 ,i confess to having once spent nine years in ,london without putting my nose outside it2 and though this was better1 perhaps1 than the restless globe-trotting vagabondage of the idle rich1 wandering from hotel to hotel and never really living anywhere1 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 7which1 by the way1 ,i very nearly did1 my professional income not having as yet begun to sprout74 ,there are masses of people who could afford at least a trip to ,margate1 and a good many who could afford a trip round the world1 who are more immovable than ,aldgate pump4 ,to others1 who would move if they knew how1 travelling is surrounded with imaginary difficulties and terrors4 ,in short1 the difficulty is not to fix people1 but to root them up4 ,we keep repeating the silly proverb that a rolling stone gathers no moss1 as if moss were a desirable parasite4 ,what we mean is that a vagabond does not prosper4 ,even this is not true1 if prosperity means enjoyment as well as responsibility and money4 ,the real misery of vagabondage is the misery of having nothing to do and nowhere to go1 the misery of being derelict of ,god and ,man1 the misery of the idle1 poor or rich4 ,and this is one of the miseries of unoccupied childhood4 ,the unoccupied adult1 thus afflicted1 tries many distractions which are1 to say the least1 unsuited to children4 ,but one of them1 the distraction of seeing the world1 is innocent and beneficial4 ,also it is childish1 being a continuation of what nurses call taking notice1 by which a child becomes experienced4 ,it is pitiable nowadays to see men and women doing after the age of #de all the travelling and sightseeing they should have done before they were #ae4 ,mere wondering and staring at things is an important part of a child's education3 that is why children can be thoroughly mobilized without making vagabonds of them4 ,a vagabond is at home nowhere because he wanders3 a child should wander because it ought to be at home everywhere4 ,and if it has its papers and its passports1 and gets what it requires not by begging and pilfering1 but from responsible agents of the community as of right1 and with some formal acknowledgment of the obligations it is incurring and a knowledge of the fact that these obligations are being recorded3 if1 further1 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 locomotion1 it can roam without much danger of gypsification4 ,under such circumstances the boy or girl could always run away1 and never be lost2 and on no other conditions can a child be free without being also a homeless outcast4 ,parents could also run away from disagreeable children or drive them out of doors or even drop their acquaintance1 temporarily or permanently1 without inhumanity4 ,thus both parties would be on their good behavior1 and not1 as at present1 on their filial or parental behavior1 which1 like all unfree behavior1 is mostly bad behavior4 ,as to what other results might follow1 we had better wait and see2 for nobody now alive can imagine what customs and institutions would grow up in societies of free children4 ,child laws and child fashions1 child manners and child morals are now not tolerated2 but among free children there would certainly be surprising developments in this direction4 ,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 free4 ,they could hardly behave worse1 anyhow4 ,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 children4 ,children are extremely cruel without intending it2 and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the reason is that they do not conceive their elders as having any human feelings4 ,serve the elders right1 perhaps1 for posing as superhuman6 ,the penalty of the impostor is not that he is found out 7he very seldom is7 but that he is taken for what he pretends to be1 and treated as such4 ,and to be treated as anything but what you really are may seem pleasant to the imagination when the treatment is above your merits2 but in actual experience it is often quite the reverse4 ,when ,i was a very small boy1 my romantic imagination1 stimulated by early doses of fiction1 led me to brag to a still smaller boy so outrageously that he1 being a simple soul1 really believed me to be an invincible hero4 ,i cannot remember whether this pleased me much2 but ,i do remember very distinctly that one day this admirer of mine1 who had a pet goat1 found the animal in the hands of a larger boy than either of us1 who mocked him and refused to restore the animal to his rightful owner4 ,whereupon1 naturally1 he came weeping to me1 and demanded that ,i should rescue the goat and annihilate the aggressor4 ,my terror was beyond description3 fortunately for me1 it imparted such a ghastliness to my voice and aspect as ,i under the eye of my poor little dupe1 advanced on the enemy with that hideous extremity of cowardice which is called the courage of despair1 and said ,you let go that goat1 that he abandoned his prey and fled1 to my unforgettable1 unspeakable relief4 ,i have never since exaggerated my prowess in bodily combat4 ,now what happened to me in the adventure of the goat happens very often to parents1 and would happen to schoolmasters if the prison door of the school did not shut out the trials of life4 ,i remember once1 at school1 the resident head master was brought down to earth by the sudden illness of his wife4 ,in the confusion that ensued it became necessary to leave one of the schoolrooms without a master4 ,i was in the class that occupied that schoolroom4 ,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 hazards4 ,therefore an appeal had to be made to our better feelings3 that is1 to our common humanity1 not to make a noise4 ,but the head master had never admitted any common humanity with us4 ,we had been carefully broken in to regard him as a being quite aloof from and above us3 one not subject to error or suffering or death or illness or mortality4 ,consequently sympathy was impossible2 and if the unfortunate lady did not perish1 it was because1 as ,i now comfort myself with guessing1 she was too much pre-occupied with her own pains1 and possibly making too much noise herself1 to be conscious of the pandemonium downstairs4 ,a great deal of the fiendishness of schoolboys and the cruelty of children to their elders is produced just in this way4 ,elders cannot be superhuman beings and suffering fellow-creatures at the same time4 ,if you pose as a little god1 you must pose for better for worse4 ,how ,little ,we ,know ,about ,our ,parents ,the relation between parent and child has cruel moments for the parent even when money is no object1 and the material worries are delegated to servants and school teachers4 ,the child and the parent are strangers to one another necessarily1 because their ages must differ widely4 ,read ,goethe's autobiography2 and note that though he was happy in his parents and had exceptional powers of observation1 divination1 and story-telling1 he knew less about his father and mother than about most of the other people he mentions4 ,i myself was never on bad terms with my mother3 we lived together until ,i was forty-two years old1 absolutely without the smallest friction of any kind2 yet when her death set me thinking curiously about our relations1 ,i realized that ,i knew very little about her4 ,introduce me to a strange woman who was a child when ,i was a child1 a girl when ,i was a boy1 an adolescent when ,i was an adolescent2 and if we take naturally to one another ,i will know more of her and she of me at the end of forty days 7,i had almost said of forty minutes7 than ,i knew of my mother at the end of forty years4 ,a contemporary stranger is a novelty and an enigma1 also a possibility2 but a mother is like a broomstick or like the sun in the heavens1 it does not matter which as far as one's knowledge of her is concerned3 the broomstick is there and the sun is there2 and whether the child is beaten by it or warmed and enlightened by it1 it accepts it as a fact in nature1 and does not conceive it as having had youth1 passions1 and weaknesses1 or as still growing1 yearning1 suffering1 and learning4 ,if ,i meet a widow ,i may ask her all about her marriage2 but what son ever dreams of asking his mother about her marriage1 or could endure to hear of it without violently breaking off the old sacred relationship between them1 and ceasing to be her child or anything more to her than the first man in the street might be8 ,yet though in this sense the child cannot realize its parent's humanity1 the parent can realize the child's2 for the parents with their experience of life have none of the illusions about the child that the child has about the parents2 and the consequence is that the child can hurt its parents' feelings much more than its parents can hurt the child's1 because the child1 even when there has been none of the deliberate hypocrisy by which children are taken advantage of by their elders1 cannot conceive the parent as a fellow-creature1 whilst the parents know very well that the children are only themselves over again4 ,the child cannot conceive that its blame or contempt or want of interest could possibly hurt its parent1 and therefore expresses them all with an indifference which has given rise to the term enfant terrible 7a tragic term in spite of the jests connected with it72 whilst the parent can suffer from such slights and reproaches more from a child than from anyone else1 even when the child is not beloved1 because the child is so unmistakably sincere in them4 ,our ,abandoned ,mothers ,take a very common instance of this agonizing incompatibility4 ,a widow brings up her son to manhood4 ,he meets a strange woman1 and goes off with and marries her1 leaving his mother desolate4 ,it does not occur to him that this is at all hard on her3 he does it as a matter of course1 and actually expects his mother to receive1 on terms of special affection1 the woman for whom she has been abandoned4 ,if he shewed any sense of what he was doing1 any remorse2 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 wife1 she could give him her blessing and accept her bereavement with dignity and without reproach4 ,but the man never dreams of such considerations4 ,to him his mother's feeling in the matter1 when she betrays it1 is unreasonable1 ridiculous1 and even odious1 as shewing a prejudice against his adorable bride4 ,i have taken the widow as an extreme and obvious case2 but there are many husbands and wives who are tired of their consorts1 or disappointed in them1 or estranged from them by infidelities2 and these parents1 in losing a son or a daughter through marriage1 may be losing everything they care for4 ,no parent's love is as innocent as the love of a child3 the exclusion of all conscious sexual feeling from it does not exclude the bitterness1 jealousy1 and despair at loss which characterize sexual passion3 in fact1 what is called a pure love may easily be more selfish and jealous than a carnal one4 ,anyhow1 it is plain matter of fact that naively selfish people sometimes try with fierce jealousy to prevent their children marrying4 ,family ,affection ,until the family as we know it ceases to exist1 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 parents4 ,not even ,tolstoy1 in ,the ,kreutzer ,sonata1 has said all that we suspect about it4 ,when it persists beyond the period at which it ceases to be necessary to the child's welfare1 it is apt to be morbid2 and we are probably wrong to inculcate its deliberate cultivation4 ,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 another4 ,the child does this readily enough to form fresh ties1 closer and more fascinating4 ,parents are not always excluded from such compensations3 it happens sometimes that when the children go out at the door the lover comes in at the window4 ,indeed it happens now oftener than it used to1 because people remain much longer in the sexual arena4 ,the cultivated ,jewess no longer cuts off her hair at her marriage4 ,the ,british matron has discarded her cap and her conscientious ugliness2 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 time4 ,but as people marry later1 the facts of age and time still inexorably condemn most parents to comparative solitude when their children marry4 ,this may be a privation and may be a relief3 probably in healthy circumstances it is no worse than a salutary change of habit2 but even at that it is1 for the moment at least1 a wrench4 ,for though parents and children sometimes dislike one another1 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 7a foster parent7 in a quite peculiar way4 ,a benefit to the child may be a burden to the parent2 but people become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them2 and to suffer little children has become an affectionate impulse deep in our nature4 ,now there is no such impulse to suffer our sisters and brothers1 our aunts and uncles1 much less our cousins4 ,if we could choose our relatives1 we might1 by selecting congenial ones1 mitigate the repulsive effect of the obligation to like them and to admit them to our intimacy4 ,but to have a person imposed on us as a brother merely because he happens to have the same parents is unbearable when1 as may easily happen1 he is the sort of person we should carefully avoid if he were anyone else's brother4 ,all ,europe 7except ,scotland1 which has clans instead of families7 draws the line at second cousins4 ,protestantism draws it still closer by making the first cousin a marriageable stranger2 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 them1 and thus imposes on us a curious relation in which familiarity destroys romantic charm1 and is yet expected to create a specially warm affection4 ,such a relation is dangerously factitious and unnatural2 and the practical moral is that the less said at home about specific family affection the better4 ,children1 like grown-up people1 get on well enough together if they are not pushed down one another's throats2 and grown-up relatives will get on together in proportion to their separation and their care not to presume on their blood relationship4 ,we should let children's feelings take their natural course without prompting4 ,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 absence3 a typical example of the way in which spurious family sentiment is stoked up4 ,we are1 after all1 sociable animals2 and if we are let alone in the matter of our affections1 and well brought up otherwise1 we shall not get on any the worse with particular people because they happen to be our brothers and sisters and cousins4 ,the danger lies in assuming that we shall get on any better4 ,the main point to grasp here is that families are not kept together at present by family feeling but by human feeling4 ,the family cultivates sympathy and mutual help and consolation as any other form of kindly association cultivates them2 but the addition of a dictated compulsory affection as an attribute of near kinship is not only unnecessary1 but positively detrimental2 and the alleged tendency of modern social development to break up the family need alarm nobody4 ,we cannot break up the facts of kinship nor eradicate its natural emotional consequences4 ,what we can do and ought to do is to set people free to behave naturally and to change their behavior as circumstances change4 ,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 umbrella4 ,the civilized man has no special use for cousins2 and he may presently find that he has no special use for brothers and sisters4 ,the parent seems likely to remain indispensable2 but there is no reason why that natural tie should be made the excuse for unnatural aggravations of it1 as crushing to the parent as they are oppressive to the child4 ,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 motherland4 ,pending such reforms and emancipations1 a shattering break-up of the parental home must remain one of the normal incidents of marriage4 ,the parent is left lonely and the child is not4 ,woe to the old if they have no impersonal interests1 no convictions1 no public causes to advance1 no tastes or hobbies6 ,it is well to be a mother but not to be a mother-in-law2 and if men were cut off artificially from intellectual and public interests as women are1 the father-in-law would be as deplorable a figure in popular tradition as the mother-in-law4 ,it is not to be wondered at that some people hold that blood relationship should be kept a secret from the persons related1 and that the happiest condition in this respect is that of the foundling who1 if he ever meets his parents or brothers or sisters1 passes them by without knowing them4 ,and for such a view there is this to be said3 that our family system does unquestionably take the natural bond between members of the same family1 which1 like all natural bonds1 is not too tight to be borne1 and superimposes on it a painful burden of forced1 inculcated1 suggested1 and altogether unnecessary affection and responsibility which we should do well to get rid of by making relatives as independent of one another as possible4 ,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 marriage4 ,marriage is not a single invariable institution3 it changes from civilization to civilization1 from religion to religion1 from civil code to civil code1 from frontier to frontier4 ,the family is still more variable1 because the number of persons constituting a family1 unlike the number of persons constituting a marriage1 varies from one to twenty3 indeed1 when a widower with a family marries a widow with a family1 and the two produce a third family1 even that very high number may be surpassed4 ,and the conditions may vary between opposite extremes3 for example1 in a ,london or ,paris slum every child adds to the burden of poverty and helps to starve the parents and all the other children1 whereas in a settlement of pioneer colonists every child1 from the moment it is big enough to lend a hand to the family industry1 is an investment in which the only danger is that of temporary over-capitalization4 ,then there are the variations in family sentiment4 ,sometimes the family organization is as frankly political as the organization of an army or an industry3 fathers being no more expected to be sentimental about their children than colonels about soldiers1 or factory owners about their employees1 though the mother may be allowed a little tenderness if her character is weak4 ,the ,roman father was a despot3 the ,chinese father is an object of worship3 the sentimental modern western father is often a play-fellow looked to for toys and pocket-money4 ,the farmer sees his children constantly3 the squire sees them only during the holidays1 and not then oftener than he can help3 the tram conductor1 when employed by a joint stock company1 sometimes never sees them at all4 ,under such circumstances phrases like ,the ,influence of ,home ,life1 ,the ,family1 ,the ,domestic ,hearth1 and so on1 are no more specific than ,the ,mammals1 or ,the ,man ,in ,the ,street2 and the pious generalizations founded so glibly on them by our sentimental moralists are unworkable4 ,when households average twelve persons with the sexes about equally represented1 the results may be fairly good4 ,when they average three the results may be very bad indeed2 and to lump the two together under the general term ,the ,family is to confuse the question hopelessly4 ,the modern small family is much too stuffy3 children brought up at home in it are unfit for society4 ,but here again circumstances differ4 ,if the parents live in what is called a garden suburb1 where there is a good deal of social intercourse1 and the family1 instead of keeping itself to itself1 as the evil old saying is1 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 importance1 is in effect broken up by school life1 by out-of-door habits1 and by frank neighborly intercourse through dances and concerts and theatricals and excursions and the like1 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 smoke4 ,all one can say is1 roughly1 that the homelier the home1 and the more familiar the family1 the worse for everybody concerned4 ,the family ideal is a humbug and a nuisance3 one might as reasonably talk of the barrack ideal1 or the forecastle ideal1 or any other substitution of the machinery of social organization for the end of it1 which must always be the fullest and most capable life3 in short1 the most godly life4 ,and this significant word reminds us that though the popular conception of heaven includes a ,holy ,family1 it does not attach to that family the notion of a separate home1 or a private nursery or kitchen or mother-in-law1 or anything that constitutes the family as we know it4 ,even blood relationship is miraculously abstracted from it2 and the ,father is the father of all children1 the mother the mother of all mothers and babies1 and the ,son the ,son of ,man and the ,savior of his brothers3 one whose chief utterance on the subject of the conventional family was an invitation to all of us to leave our families and follow him1 and to leave the dead to bury the dead1 and not debauch ourselves at that gloomy festival the family funeral1 with its sequel of hideous mourning and grief which is either affected or morbid4 ,family ,mourning ,i do not know how far this detestable custom of mourning is carried in ,france2 but judging from the appearance of the ,french people ,i should say that a ,frenchwoman goes into mourning for her cousins to the seventeenth degree4 ,the result is that when ,i cross the ,channel ,i seem to have reached a country devastated by war or pestilence4 ,it is really suffering only from the family4 ,will anyone pretend that ,england has not the best of this striking difference8 ,yet it is such senseless and unnatural conventions as this that make us so impatient of what we call family feeling4 ,even apart from its insufferable pretensions1 the family needs hearty discrediting2 for there is hardly any vulnerable part of it that could not be amputated with advantage4 ,art ,teaching ,by art teaching ,i hasten to say that ,i do not mean giving children lessons in freehand drawing and perspective4 ,i am simply calling attention to the fact that fine art is the only teacher except torture4 ,i have already pointed out that nobody1 except under threat of torture1 can read a school book4 ,the reason is that a school book is not a work of art4 ,similarly1 you cannot listen to a lesson or a sermon unless the teacher or the preacher is an artist4 ,you cannot read the ,bible if you have no sense of literary art4 ,the reason why the continental ,european is1 to the ,englishman or ,american1 so surprisingly ignorant of the ,bible1 is that the authorized ,english version is a great work of literary art1 and the continental versions are comparatively artless4 ,to read a dull book2 to listen to a tedious play or prosy sermon or lecture2 to stare at uninteresting pictures or ugly buildings3 nothing1 short of disease1 is more dreadful than this4 ,the violence done to our souls by it leaves injuries and produces subtle maladies which have never been properly studied by psycho-pathologists4 ,yet we are so inured to it in school1 where practically all the teachers are bores trying to do the work of artists1 and all the books artless1 that we acquire a truly frightful power of enduring boredom4 ,we even acquire the notion that fine art is lascivious and destructive to the character4 ,in church1 in the ,house of ,commons1 at public meetings1 we sit solemnly listening to bores and twaddlers because from the time we could walk or speak we have been snubbed1 scolded1 bullied1 beaten and imprisoned whenever we dared to resent being bored or twaddled at1 or to express our natural impatience and derision of bores and twaddlers4 ,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 panjandrums1 like ,voltaire or ,dickens1 we are shocked and scandalized1 even when we cannot help laughing4 ,worse1 we dread and persecute those who can see and declare the truth1 because their sincerity and insight reflects on our delusion and blindness4 ,we are all like ,nell ,gwynne's footman1 who defended ,nell's reputation with his fists1 not because he believed her to be what he called an honest woman1 but because he objected to be scorned as the footman of one who was no better than she should be4 ,this wretched power of allowing ourselves to be bored may seem to give the fine arts a chance sometimes4 ,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 ,parliament4 ,but their endurance is very bad for the ninth symphony1 because they never hiss when it is murdered4 ,i have heard an ,italian conductor 7no longer living7 take the adagio of that symphony at a lively allegretto1 slowing down for the warmer major sections into the speed and manner of the heroine's death song in a ,verdi opera2 and the listeners1 far from relieving my excruciation by rising with yells of fury and hurling their programs and opera glasses at the miscreant1 behaved just as they do when ,richter conducts it4 ,the mass of imposture that thrives on this combination of ignorance with despairing endurance is incalculable4 ,given a public trained from childhood to stand anything tedious1 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 home2 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 ,england4 ,fortunately1 there are arts that cannot be cut off from the people by bad performances4 ,we can read books for ourselves2 and we can play a good deal of fine music for ourselves with the help of a pianola4 ,nothing stands between us and the actual handwork of the great masters of painting except distance2 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 handwriting4 ,the reproduction of great feats of musical execution is already on the way3 the phonograph1 for all its wheezing and snarling and braying1 is steadily improving in its manners2 and what with this improvement on the one hand1 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 7few critics of the phonograph seem to be conscious of the very considerable mechanical noise set up by choirs and orchestras7 we have at last reached a point at which1 for example1 a person living in an ,english village where the church music is the only music1 and that music is made by a few well-intentioned ladies with the help of a harmonium1 can hear masses by ,palestrina very passably executed1 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 ,god4 ,in short1 there is a vast body of art now within the reach of everybody4 ,the difficulty is that this art1 which alone can educate us in grace of body and soul1 and which alone can make the history of the past live for us or the hope of the future shine for us1 which alone can give delicacy and nobility to our crude lusts1 which is the appointed vehicle of inspiration and the method of the communion of saints1 is actually branded as sinful among us because1 wherever it arises1 there is resistance to tyranny1 breaking of fetters1 and the breath of freedom4 ,the attempt to suppress art is not wholly successful3 we might as well try to suppress oxygen4 ,but it is carried far enough to inflict on huge numbers of people a most injurious art starvation1 and to corrupt a great deal of the art that is tolerated4 ,you will find in ,england plenty of rich families with little more culture than their dogs and horses4 ,and you will find poor families1 cut off by poverty and town life from the contemplation of the beauty of the earth1 with its dresses of leaves1 its scarves of cloud1 and its contours of hill and valley1 who would positively be happier as hogs1 so little have they cultivated their humanity by the only effective instrument of culture3 art4 ,the dearth is artificially maintained even when there are the means of satisfying it4 ,story books are forbidden1 picture post cards are forbidden1 theatres are forbidden1 operas are forbidden1 circuses are forbidden1 sweetmeats are forbidden1 pretty colors are forbidden1 all exactly as vice is forbidden4 ,the ,creator is explicitly prayed to1 and implicitly convicted of indecency every day4 ,an association of vice and sin with everything that is delightful and of goodness with everything that is wretched and detestable is set up4 ,all the most perilous 7and glorious7 appetites and propensities are at once inflamed by starvation and uneducated by art4 ,all the wholesome conditions which art imposes on appetite are waived3 instead of cultivated men and women restrained by a thousand delicacies1 repelled by ugliness1 chilled by vulgarity1 horrified by coarseness1 deeply and sweetly moved by the graces that art has revealed to them and nursed in them1 we get indiscriminate rapacity in pursuit of pleasure and a parade of the grossest stimulations in catering for it4 ,we have a continual clamor for goodness1 beauty1 virtue1 and sanctity1 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 savings4 ,do not for a moment suppose that uncultivated people are merely indifferent to high and noble qualities4 ,they hate them malignantly4 ,at best1 such qualities are like rare and beautiful birds3 when they appear the whole country takes down its guns2 but the birds receive the statuary tribute of having their corpses stuffed4 ,and it really all comes from the habit of preventing children from being troublesome4 ,you are so careful of your boy's morals1 knowing how troublesome they may be1 that you keep him away from the ,venus of ,milo only to find him in the arms of the scullery maid or someone much worse4 ,you decide that the ,hermes of ,praxiteles and ,wagner's ,tristan are not suited for young girls2 and your daughter marries somebody appallingly unlike either ,hermes or ,tristan solely to escape from your parental protection4 ,you have not stifled a single passion nor averted a single danger3 you have depraved the passions by starving them1 and broken down all the defences which so effectively protect children brought up in freedom4 ,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 pavement4 ,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 body1 and for the abolition of pictures1 statues1 theatres1 and pretty colors4 ,and incredible as it seems1 these unhappy lunatics are left at large1 unrebuked1 even admired and revered1 whilst artists have to struggle for toleration4 ,to them an undraped human body is the most monstrous1 the most blighting1 the most obscene1 the most unbearable spectacle in the universe4 ,to an artist it is1 at its best1 the most admirable spectacle in nature1 and1 at its average1 an object of indifference4 ,if every rag of clothing miraculously dropped from the inhabitants of ,london at noon tomorrow 7say as a preliminary to the ,great ,judgment71 the artistic people would not turn a hair2 but the artless people would go mad and call on the mountains to hide them4 ,i submit that this indicates a thoroughly healthy state on the part of the artists1 and a thoroughly morbid one on the part of the artless4 ,and the healthy state is attainable in a cold country like ours only by familiarity with the undraped figure acquired through pictures1 statues1 and theatrical representations in which an illusion of natural clotheslessness is produced and made poetic4 ,in short1 we all grow up stupid and mad to just the extent to which we have not been artistically educated2 and the fact that this taint of stupidity and madness has to be tolerated because it is general1 and is even boasted of as characteristically ,english1 makes the situation all the worse4 ,it is becoming exceedingly grave at present1 because the last ray of art is being cut off from our schools by the discontinuance of religious education4 ,the ,impossibility of ,secular ,education ,now children must be taught some sort of religion4 ,secular education is an impossibility4 ,secular education comes to this3 that the only reason for ceasing to do evil and learning to do well is that if you do not you will be caned4 ,this is worse than being taught in a church school that if you become a dissenter you will go to hell2 for hell is presented as the instrument of something eternal1 divine1 and inevitable3 you cannot evade it the moment the schoolmaster's back is turned4 ,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 ,churches4 ,just as a child1 no matter what its race and color may be1 should know that there are black men and brown men and yellow men1 and1 no matter what its political convictions may be1 that there are ,monarchists and ,republicans and ,positivists1 ,socialists and ,unsocialists1 so it should know that there are ,christians and ,mahometans and ,buddhists and ,shintoists and so forth1 and that they are on the average just as honest and well-behaved as its own father4 ,for example1 it should not be told that ,allah is a false god set up by the ,turks and ,arabs1 who will all be damned for taking that liberty2 but it should be told that many ,english people think so1 and that many ,turks and ,arabs think the converse about ,english people4 ,it should be taught that ,allah is simply the name by which ,god is known to ,turks and ,arabs1 who are just as eligible for salvation as any ,christian4 ,further1 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 ,christ1 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 reach4 ,any other teaching of the history and present facts of religion is false teaching1 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 island4 ,but this objectivity1 though intellectually honest1 tells the child only what other people believe4 ,what it should itself believe is quite another matter4 ,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 mad4 ,the child must have a conscience and a code of honor 7which is the essence of religion7 even if it be only a provisional one1 to be revised at its confirmation4 ,for confirmation is meant to signalize a spiritual coming of age1 and may be a repudiation4 ,really active souls have many confirmations and repudiations as their life deepens and their knowledge widens4 ,but what is to guide the child before its first confirmation8 ,not mere orders1 because orders must have a sanction of some sort or why should the child obey them8 ,if1 as a ,secularist1 you refuse to teach any sanction1 you must say ,you will be punished if you disobey4 ,yes1 says the child to itself1 if ,i am found out2 but wait until your back is turned and ,i will do as ,i like1 and lie about it4 ,there can be no objective punishment for successful fraud2 and as no espionage can cover the whole range of a child's conduct1 the upshot is that the child becomes a liar and schemer with an atrophied conscience4 ,and a good many of the orders given to it are not obeyed after all4 ,thus the ,secularist who is not a fool is forced to appeal to the child's vital impulse towards perfection1 to the divine spark2 and no resolution not to call this impulse an impulse of loyalty to the ,fellowship of the ,holy ,ghost1 or obedience to the ,will of ,god1 or any other standard theological term1 can alter the fact that the ,secularist has stepped outside ,secularism and is educating the child religiously1 even if he insists on repudiating that pious adverb and substituting the word metaphysically4 ,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 ,churches1 free or established1 from obtaining an exclusive right of entry to schools1 we shall not be able to exclude religion from them4 ,the most horrible of all religions3 that which teaches us to regard ourselves as the helpless prey of a series of senseless accidents called ,natural ,selection1 is allowed and even welcomed in so-called secular schools because it is1 in a sense1 the negation of all religion2 but for school purposes a religion is a belief which affects conduct2 and no belief affects conduct more radically and often so disastrously as the belief that the universe is a product of ,natural ,selection4 ,what is more1 the theory of ,natural ,selection cannot be kept out of schools1 because many of the natural facts that present the most plausible appearance of design can be accounted for by ,natural ,selection2 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 attraction4 ,even if you make a religion of ,natural ,selection1 and teach the child to regard itself as the irresponsible prey of its circumstances and appetites 7or its heredity as you will perhaps call them71 you will none the less find that its appetites are stimulated by your encouragement and daunted by your discouragement2 that one of its appetites is an appetite for perfection2 that if you discourage this appetite and encourage the cruder acquisitive appetites the child will steal and lie and be a nuisance to you2 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 appetites1 it will be a much nicer child and you will have a much easier job1 at which point you will1 in spite of your pseudoscientific jargon1 find yourself back in the old-fashioned religious teaching as deep as ,dr4 ,watts and in fact fathoms deeper4 ,moral ,instruction ,leagues ,and now the voices of our ,moral ,instruction ,leagues will be lifted1 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 religions4 ,yes3 there are many reasons2 and one of them is that children all like the story of ,jonah and the whale 7they 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 throat7 and that no child on earth can stand moral instruction books or catechisms or any other statement of the case for religion in abstract terms4 ,the object of a moral instruction book is not to be rational1 scientific1 exact1 proof against controversy1 nor even credible3 its object is to make children good2 and if it makes them sick instead its place is the waste-paper basket4 ,take for an illustration the story of ,elisha and the bears4 ,to the authors of the moral instruction books it is in the last degree reprehensible4 ,it is obviously not true as a record of fact2 and the picture it gives us of the temper of ,god 7which is what interests an adult reader7 is shocking and blasphemous4 ,but it is a capital story for a child4 ,it interests a child because it is about bears2 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 children1 which is a highly desirable impression1 and just as much as a child is capable of receiving from the story4 ,when a story is about ,god and a child1 children take ,god for granted and criticize the child4 ,adults do the opposite1 and are thereby led to talk great nonsense about the bad effect of ,bible stories on infants4 ,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 whatever4 ,it is only by an unfettered access to the whole body of ,fine ,art3 that is1 to the whole body of inspired revelation1 that we can build up that conception of divinity to which all virtue is an aspiration4 ,and to hope to find this body of art purified from all that is obsolete or dangerous or fierce or lusty1 or to pick and choose what will be good for any particular child1 much less for all children1 is the shallowest of vanities4 ,such schoolmasterly selection is neither possible nor desirable4 ,ignorance of evil is not virtue but imbecility3 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 one4 ,virtue chooses good from evil2 and without knowledge there can be no choice4 ,and even this is a dangerous simplification of what actually occurs4 ,we are not choosing3 we are growing4 ,were you to cut all of what you call the evil out of a child1 it would drop dead4 ,if you try to stretch it to full human stature when it is ten years old1 you will simply pull it into two pieces and be hanged4 ,and when you try to do this morally1 which is what parents and schoolmasters are doing every day1 you ought to be hanged2 and some day1 when we take a sensible view of the matter1 you will be2 and serve you right4 ,the child does not stand between a good and a bad angel3 what it has to deal with is a middling angel who1 in normal healthy cases1 wants to be a good angel as fast as it can without killing itself in the process1 which is a dangerous one4 ,therefore there is no question of providing the child with a carefully regulated access to good art4 ,there is no good art1 any more than there is good anything else in the absolute sense4 ,art that is too good for the child will either teach it nothing or drive it mad1 as the ,bible has driven many people mad who might have kept their sanity had they been allowed to read much lower forms of literature4 ,the practical moral is that we must read whatever stories1 see whatever pictures1 hear whatever songs and symphonies1 go to whatever plays we like4 ,we shall not like those which have nothing to say to us2 and though everyone has a right to bias our choice1 no one has a right to deprive us of it by keeping us from any work of art or any work of art from us4 ,i may now say without danger of being misunderstood that the popular ,english compromise called ,cowper ,templeism 7unsectarian ,bible education7 is not so silly as it looks4 ,it is true that the ,bible inculcates half a dozen religions3 some of them barbarous2 some cynical and pessimistic2 some amoristic and romantic2 some sceptical and challenging2 some kindly1 simple1 and intuitional2 some sophistical and intellectual2 none suited to the character and conditions of western civilization unless it be the ,christianity which was finally suppressed by the ,crucifixion1 and has never been put into practice by any ,state before or since4 ,but the ,bible contains the ancient literature of a very remarkable ,oriental race2 and the imposition of this literature1 on whatever false pretences1 on our children left them more literate than if they knew no literature at all1 which was the practical alternative4 ,and as our ,authorized ,version is a great work of art as well1 to know it was better than knowing no art1 which also was the practical alternative4 ,it is at least not a school book2 and it is not a bad story book1 horrible as some of the stories are4 ,therefore as between the ,bible and the blank represented by secular education1 the choice is with the ,bible4 ,the ,bible ,but the ,bible is not sufficient4 ,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 day4 ,nietzsche's ,thus ,spake ,zoroaster is less comforting to the ill and unhappy than the ,psalms2 but it is much truer1 subtler1 and more edifying4 ,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 closes1 or supply the need of such modern revelations as ,shelley's ,prometheus or ,the ,niblung's ,ring of ,richard ,wagner4 ,there is nothing in the ,bible greater in inspiration than ,beethoven's ninth symphony2 and the power of modern music to convey that inspiration to a modern man is far greater than that of ,elizabethan ,english1 which is1 except for people steeped in the ,bible from childhood like ,sir ,walter ,scott and ,ruskin1 a dead language4 ,besides1 many who have no ear for literature or for music are accessible to architecture1 to pictures1 to statues1 to dresses1 and to the arts of the stage4 ,every device of art should be brought to bear on the young2 so that they may discover some form of it that delights them naturally2 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 which1 if starved or insulted1 may become morbid and seek disgraceful satisfactions1 and1 if prematurely gratified otherwise than poetically1 may destroy the stamina of the race4 ,and it must be borne in mind that the most dangerous art for this necessary purpose is the art that presents itself as religious ecstasy4 ,young people are ripe for love long before they are ripe for religion4 ,only a very foolish person would substitute the ,imitation of ,christ for ,treasure ,island as a present for a boy or girl1 or for ,byron's ,don ,juan as a present for a swain or lass4 ,pickwick is the safest saint for us in our nonage4 ,flaubert's ,temptation of ,st ,anthony is an excellent book for a man of fifty1 perhaps the best within reach as a healthy study of visionary ecstasy2 but for the purposes of a boy of fifteen ,ivanhoe and the ,templar make a much better saint and devil4 ,and the boy of fifteen will find this out for himself if he is allowed to wander in a well-stocked literary garden1 and hear bands and see pictures and spend his pennies on cinematograph shows4 ,his choice may often be rather disgusting to his elders when they want him to choose the best before he is ready for it4 ,the greatest ,protestant ,manifesto ever written1 as far as ,i know1 is ,houston ,chamberlain's ,foundations of the ,nineteenth ,century3 everybody capable of it should read it4 ,probably the ,history of ,maria ,monk is at the opposite extreme of merit 7this is a guess3 ,i have never read it72 but it is certain that a boy let loose in a library would go for ,maria ,monk and have no use whatever for ,mr ,chamberlain4 ,i should probably have read ,maria ,monk myself if ,i had not had the ,arabian ,nights and their like to occupy me better4 ,in art1 children1 like adults1 will find their level if they are left free to find it1 and not restricted to what adults think good for them4 ,just at present our young people are going mad over ragtimes1 apparently because syncopated rhythms are new to them4 ,if they had learnt what can be done with syncopation from ,beethoven's third ,leonora overture1 they would enjoy the ragtimes all the more2 but they would put them in their proper place as amusing vulgarities4 ,artist ,idolatry ,but there are more dangerous influences than ragtimes waiting for people brought up in ignorance of fine art4 ,nothing is more pitiably ridiculous than the wild worship of artists by those who have never been seasoned in youth to the enchantments of art4 ,tenors and prima donnas1 pianists and violinists1 actors and actresses enjoy powers of seduction which in the middle ages would have exposed them to the risk of being burnt for sorcery4 ,but as they exercise this power by singing1 playing1 and acting1 no great harm is done except perhaps to themselves4 ,far graver are the powers enjoyed by brilliant persons who are also connoisseurs in art4 ,the influence they can exercise on young people who have been brought up in the darkness and wretchedness of a home without art1 and in whom a natural bent towards art has always been baffled and snubbed1 is incredible to those who have not witnessed and understood it4 ,he 7or she7 who reveals the world of art to them opens heaven to them4 ,they become satellites1 disciples1 worshippers of the apostle4 ,now the apostle may be a voluptuary without much conscience4 ,nature may have given him enough virtue to suffice in a reasonable environment4 ,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 culture4 ,he may find adorers in all directions in our uncultivated society among people of stronger character than himself1 not one of whom1 if they had been artistically educated1 would have had anything to learn from him or regarded him as in any way extraordinary apart from his actual achievements as an artist4 ,tartuffe is not always a priest4 ,indeed he is not always a rascal3 he is often a weak man absurdly credited with omniscience and perfection1 and taking unfair advantages only because they are offered to him and he is too weak to refuse4 ,give everyone his culture1 and no one will offer him more than his due4 ,in thus delivering our children from the idolatry of the artist1 we shall not destroy for them the enchantment of art3 on the contrary1 we shall teach them to demand art everywhere as a condition attainable by cultivating the body1 mind1 and heart4 ,art1 said ,morris1 is the expression of pleasure in work4 ,and certainly1 when work is made detestable by slavery1 there is no art4 ,it is only when learning is made a slavery by tyrannical teachers that art becomes loathsome to the pupil4 ,the ,machine ,when we set to work at a ,constitution to secure freedom for children1 we had better bear in mind that the children may not be at all obliged to us for our pains4 ,rousseau said that men are born free2 and this saying1 in its proper bearings1 was and is a great and true saying2 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 them4 ,on the contrary1 it has to be forced on them2 and even then they will give it the slip if it is not religiously inculcated and strongly safeguarded4 ,besides1 men are born docile1 and must in the nature of things remain so with regard to everything they do not understand4 ,now political science and the art of government are among the things they do not understand1 and indeed are not at present allowed to understand4 ,they can be enslaved by a system1 as we are at present1 because it happens to be there1 and nobody understands it4 ,an intelligently worked ,capitalist system1 as ,comte saw1 would give us all that most of us are intelligent enough to want4 ,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 it3 our millionaires and statesmen are manifestly no more captains of industry or scientific politicians than our bookmakers are mathematicians4 ,for some time past a significant word has been coming into use as a substitute for ,destiny1 ,fate1 and ,providence4 ,it is ,the ,machine3 the machine that has no god in it4 ,why do governments do nothing in spite of reports of ,royal ,commissions that establish the most frightful urgency8 ,why do our philanthropic millionaires do nothing1 though they are ready to throw bucketfuls of gold into the streets8 ,the ,machine will not let them4 ,always the ,machine4 ,in short1 they dont know how4 ,they try to reform ,society as an old lady might try to restore a broken down locomotive by prodding it with a knitting needle4 ,and this is not at all because they are born fools1 but because they have been educated1 not into manhood and freedom1 but into blindness and slavery by their parents and schoolmasters1 themselves the victims of a similar misdirection1 and consequently of ,the ,machine4 ,they do not want liberty4 ,they have not been educated to want it4 ,they choose slavery and inequality2 and all the other evils are automatically added to them4 ,and yet we must have ,the ,machine4 ,it is only in unskilled hands under ignorant direction that machinery is dangerous4 ,we can no more govern modern communities without political machinery than we can feed and clothe them without industrial machinery4 ,shatter ,the ,machine1 and you get ,anarchy4 ,and yet ,the ,machine works so detestably at present that we have people who advocate ,anarchy and call themselves ,anarchists4 ,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 particular4 ,but the difficulty in combining law and order with free institutions is not a natural one4 ,it is a matter of inculcation4 ,if people are brought up to be slaves1 it is useless and dangerous to let them loose at the age of twenty-one and say ,now you are free4 ,no one with the tamed soul and broken spirit of a slave can be free4 ,it is like saying to a laborer brought up on a family income of thirteen shillings a week1 ,here is one hundred thousand pounds3 now you are wealthy4 ,nothing can make such a man really wealthy4 ,freedom and wealth are difficult and responsible conditions to which men must be accustomed and socially trained from birth4 ,a nation that is free at twenty-one is not free at all2 just as a man first enriched at fifty remains poor all his life1 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 time4 ,you cannot govern men brought up as slaves otherwise than as slaves are governed4 ,you may pile ,bills of ,right and ,habeas ,corpus ,acts on ,great ,charters2 promulgate ,american ,constitutions2 burn the chateaux and guillotine the seigneurs2 chop off the heads of kings and queens and set up ,democracy on the ruins of feudalism3 the end of it all for us is that already in the twentieth century there has been as much brute coercion and savage intolerance1 as much flogging and hanging1 as much impudent injustice on the bench and lustful rancor in the pulpit1 as much naive resort to torture1 persecution1 and suppression of free speech and freedom of the press1 as much war1 as much of the vilest excess of mutilation1 rapine1 and delirious indiscriminate slaughter of helpless non-combatants1 old and young1 as much prostitution of professional talent1 literary and political1 in defence of manifest wrong1 as much cowardly sycophancy giving fine names to all this villainy or pretending that it is greatly exaggerated1 as we can find any record of from the days when the advocacy of liberty was a capital offence and ,democracy was hardly thinkable4 ,democracy exhibits the vanity of ,louis ,,xiv1 the savagery of ,peter of ,russia1 the nepotism and provinciality of ,napoleon1 the fickleness of ,catherine ,,ii3 in short1 all the childishnesses of all the despots without any of the qualities that enabled the greatest of them to fascinate and dominate their contemporaries4 ,and the flatterers of ,democracy are as impudently servile to the successful1 and insolent to common honest folk1 as the flatterers of the monarchs4 ,democracy in ,america has led to the withdrawal of ordinary refined persons from politics2 and the same result is coming in ,england as fast as we make ,democracy as democratic as it is in ,america4 ,this is true also of popular religion3 it is so horribly irreligious that nobody with the smallest pretence to culture1 or the least inkling of what the great prophets vainly tried to make the world understand1 will have anything to do with it except for purely secular reasons4 ,imagination ,before we can clearly understand how baleful is this condition of intimidation in which we live1 it is necessary to clear up the confusion made by our use of the word imagination to denote two very different powers of mind4 ,one is the power to imagine things as they are not3 this ,i call the romantic imagination4 ,the other is the power to imagine things as they are without actually sensing them2 and this ,i will call the realistic imagination4 ,take for example marriage and war4 ,one man has a vision of perpetual bliss with a domestic angel at home1 and of flashing sabres1 thundering guns1 victorious cavalry charges1 and routed enemies in the field4 ,that is romantic imagination2 and the mischief it does is incalculable4 ,it begins in silly and selfish expectations of the impossible1 and ends in spiteful disappointment1 sour grievance1 cynicism1 and misanthropic resistance to any attempt to better a hopeless world4 ,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 7a quite defensible and delightful amusement when you know exactly what you are doing and where fancy ends and facts begin71 but also a means of foreseeing and being prepared for realities as yet unexperienced1 and of testing the possibility and desirability of serious ,utopias4 ,he does not expect his wife to be an angel2 nor does he overlook the facts that war depends on the rousing of all the murderous blackguardism still latent in mankind2 that every victory means a defeat2 that fatigue1 hunger1 terror1 and disease are the raw material which romancers work up into military glory2 and that soldiers for the most part go to war as children go to school1 because they are afraid not to4 ,they are afraid even to say they are afraid1 as such candor is punishable by death in the military code4 ,a very little realistic imagination gives an ambitious person enormous power over the multitudinous victims of the romantic imagination4 ,for the romancer not only pleases himself with fictitious glories3 he also terrifies himself with imaginary dangers4 ,he does not even picture what these dangers are3 he conceives the unknown as always dangerous4 ,when you say to a realist ,you must do this or ,you must not do that1 he instantly asks what will happen to him if he does 7or does not1 as the case may be74 ,failing an unromantic convincing answer1 he does just as he pleases unless he can find for himself a real reason for refraining4 ,in short1 though you can intimidate him1 you cannot bluff him4 ,but you can always bluff the romantic person3 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 instead4 ,the campaigns of ,napoleon1 with their atmosphere of glory1 illustrate this4 ,in the ,russian campaign ,napoleon's marshals achieved miracles of bluff1 especially ,ney1 who1 with a handful of men1 monstrously outnumbered1 repeatedly kept the ,russian troops paralyzed with terror by pure bounce4 ,napoleon himself1 much more a realist than ,ney 7that was why he dominated him71 would probably have surrendered2 for sometimes the bravest of the brave will achieve successes never attempted by the cleverest of the clever4 ,wellington was a completer realist than ,napoleon4 ,it was impossible to persuade ,wellington that he was beaten until he actually was beaten4 ,he was unbluffable2 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 ,wellington1 he would not have left the attack at ,waterloo to ,ney and ,d',erlon1 who1 on that field1 did not know when they were beaten1 whereas ,wellington knew precisely when he was not beaten4 ,the unbluffable would have triumphed anyhow1 probably1 because ,napoleon was an academic soldier1 doing the academic thing 7the attack in columns and so forth7 with superlative ability and energy2 whilst ,wellington was an original soldier who1 instead of outdoing the terrible academic columns with still more terrible and academic columns1 outwitted them with the thin red line1 not of heroes1 but1 as this uncompromising realist never hesitated to testify1 of the scum of the earth4 ,government by ,bullies ,these picturesque martial incidents are being reproduced every day in our ordinary life4 ,we are bluffed by hardy simpletons and headstrong bounders as the ,russians were bluffed by ,ney2 and our ,wellingtons are threadbound by slave-democracy as ,gulliver was threadbound by the ,lilliputians4 ,we are a mass of people living in a submissive routine to which we have been drilled from our childhood4 ,when you ask us to take the simplest step outside that routine1 we say shyly1 ,oh1 ,i really couldnt1 or ,oh1 ,i shouldnt like to1 without being able to point out the smallest harm that could possibly ensue3 victims1 not of a rational fear of real dangers1 but of pure abstract fear1 the quintessence of cowardice1 the very negation of the fear of ,god4 ,dotted about among us are a few spirits relatively free from this inculcated paralysis1 sometimes because they are half-witted1 sometimes because they are unscrupulously selfish1 sometimes because they are realists as to money and unimaginative as to other things1 sometimes even because they are exceptionally able1 but always because they are not afraid of shadows nor oppressed with nightmares4 ,and we see these few rising as if by magic into power and affluence1 and forming1 with the millionaires who have accidentally gained huge riches by the occasional windfalls of our commerce1 the governing class4 ,now nothing is more disastrous than a governing class that does not know how to govern4 ,and how can this rabble of the casual products of luck1 cunning1 and folly1 be expected to know how to govern8 ,the merely lucky ones and the hereditary ones do not owe their position to their qualifications at all4 ,as to the rest1 the realism which seems their essential qualification often consists not only in a lack of romantic imagination1 which lack is a merit1 but of the realistic1 constructive1 ,utopian imagination1 which lack is a ghastly defect4 ,freedom from imaginative illusion is therefore no guarantee whatever of nobility of character3 that is why inculcated submissiveness makes us slaves to people much worse than ourselves1 and why it is so important that submissiveness should no longer be inculcated4 ,and yet as long as you have the compulsory school as we know it1 we shall have submissiveness inculcated4 ,what is more1 until the active hours of child life are organized separately from the active hours of adult life1 so that adults can enjoy the society of children in reason without being tormented1 disturbed1 harried1 burdened1 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 them1 we shall have schools under one pretext or another2 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 whip4 ,liberty is the breath of life to nations2 and liberty is the one thing that parents1 schoolmasters1 and rulers spend their lives in extirpating for the sake of an immediately quiet and finally disastrous life4 ,notes on this etext3 ,this text was taken from a printed volume containing the plays ,misalliance1 ,the ,dark ,lady of the ,sonnets1 ,fanny's ,first ,play1 and the essay ,a ,treatise on ,parents and ,children4 ,notes on the editing3 ,italicized text is delimited with underlines 774 ,punctuation and spelling retained as in the printed text4 ,shaw intentionally spelled many words according to a non-standard system4 ,for example1 don't is given as dont 7without apostrophe71 ,dr4 is given as ,dr 7without a period at the end71 and ,shakespeare is given as ,shakespear 7no e at the end74 ,the pound 7currency7 symbol has been replaced by the word pounds4