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