But there is another sort of answer in wide use which is neither
straightforward, instructive, nor harmless. In its simplest form it
substitutes for "Stop that noise," "Dont be naughty," which means that
the child, instead of annoying you by a perfectly healthy and natural
infantile procedure, is offending God. This is a blasphemous lie; and
the fact that it is on the lips of every nurserymaid does not excuse it
in the least. Dickens tells us of a nurserymaid who elaborated it into
"If you do that, angels wont never love you." I remember a servant who
used to tell me that if I were not good, by which she meant if I did
not behave with a single eye to her personal convenience, the cock would
come down the chimney. Less imaginative but equally dishonest people
told me I should go to hell if I did not make myself agreeable to them.
Bodily violence, provided it be the hasty expression of normal provoked
resentment and not vicious cruelty, cannot harm a child as this sort of
pious fraud harms it. There is a legal limit to physical cruelty; and
there are also human limits to it. There is an active Society which
brings to book a good many parents who starve and torture and overwork
their children, and intimidates a good many more. When parents of this
type are caught, they are treated as criminals; and not infrequently
the police have some trouble to save them from being lynched. The
people against whom children are wholly unprotected are those who devote
themselves to the very mischievous and cruel sort of abortion which is
called bringing up a child in the way it should go. Now nobody knows
the way a child should go. All the ways discovered so far lead to the
horrors of our existing civilizations, described quite justifiably by
Ruskin as heaps of agonizing human maggots, struggling with one another
for scraps of food. Pious fraud is an attempt to pervert that precious
and sacred thing the child's conscience into an instrument of our own
convenience, and to use that wonderful and terrible power called Shame
to grind our own axe. It is the sin of stealing fire from the altar: a
sin so impudently practised by popes, parents, and pedagogues, that one
can hardly expect the nurserymaids to see any harm in stealing a few
cinders when they are worrited.
Into the blackest depths of this violation of children's souls one can
hardly bear to look; for here we find pious fraud masking the violation
of the body by obscene cruelty. Any parent or school teacher who takes
a secret and abominable delight in torture is allowed to lay traps into
which every child must fall, and then beat it to his or her heart's
content. A gentleman once wrote to me and said, with an obvious
conviction that he was being most reasonable and high minded, that the
only thing he beat his children for was failure in perfect obedience and
perfect truthfulness. On these attributes, he said, he must insist. As
one of them is not a virtue at all, and the other is the attribute of a
god, one can imagine what the lives of this gentleman's children would
have been if it had been possible for him to live down to his monstrous
and foolish pretensions. And yet he might have written his letter to The
Times (he very nearly did, by the way) without incurring any danger of
being removed to an asylum, or even losing his reputation for taking
a very proper view of his parental duties. And at least it was not a
trivial view, nor an ill meant one. It was much more respectable than
the general consensus of opinion that if a school teacher can devise a
question a child cannot answer, or overhear it calling omega omeega,
he or she may beat the child viciously. Only, the cruelty must be
whitewashed by a moral excuse, and a pretence of reluctance. It must be
for the child's good. The assailant must say "This hurts me more than
it hurts you." There must be hypocrisy as well as cruelty. The injury to
the child would be far less if the voluptuary said frankly "I beat you
because I like beating you; and I shall do it whenever I can contrive
an excuse for it." But to represent this detestable lust to the child
as Divine wrath, and the cruelty as the beneficent act of God, which is
exactly what all our floggers do, is to add to the torture of the body,
out of which the flogger at least gets some pleasure, the maiming and
blinding of the child's soul, which can bring nothing but horror to
anyone.