There is, however, a good deal of spurious family affection. There is
the clannishness that will make a dozen brothers and sisters who quarrel
furiously among themselves close up their ranks and make common cause
against a brother-in-law or a sister-in-law. And there is a strong sense
of property in children, which often makes mothers and fathers bitterly
jealous of allowing anyone else to interfere with their children, whom
they may none the less treat very badly. And there is an extremely
dangerous craze for children which leads certain people to establish
orphanages and baby farms and schools, seizing any pretext for filling
their houses with children exactly as some eccentric old ladies and
gentlemen fill theirs with cats. In such places the children are the
victims of all the caprices of doting affection and all the excesses
of lascivious cruelty. Yet the people who have this morbid craze seldom
have any difficulty in finding victims. Parents and guardians are so
worried by children and so anxious to get rid of them that anyone who
is willing to take them off their hands is welcomed and whitewashed.
The very people who read with indignation of Squeers and Creakle in the
novels of Dickens are quite ready to hand over their own children
to Squeers and Creakle, and to pretend that Squeers and Creakle
are monsters of the past. But read the autobiography of Stanley the
traveller, or sit in the company of men talking about their school-days,
and you will soon find that fiction, which must, if it is to be sold and
read, stop short of being positively sickening, dare not tell the whole
truth about the people to whom children are handed over on educational
pretexts. Not very long ago a schoolmaster in Ireland was murdered by
his boys; and for reasons which were never made public it was at
first decided not to prosecute the murderers. Yet all these flogging
schoolmasters and orphanage fiends and baby farmers are "lovers of
children." They are really child fanciers (like bird fanciers or dog
fanciers) by irresistible natural predilection, never happy unless they
are surrounded by their victims, and always certain to make their living
by accepting the custody of children, no matter how many alternative
occupations may be available. And bear in mind that they are only
the extreme instances of what is commonly called natural affection,
apparently because it is obviously unnatural.
The really natural feeling of adults for children in the long prosaic
intervals between the moments of affectionate impulse is just that
feeling that leads them to avoid their care and constant company as a
burden beyond bearing, and to pretend that the places they send them to
are well conducted, beneficial, and indispensable to the success of the
children in after life. The true cry of the kind mother after her little
rosary of kisses is "Run away, darling." It is nicer than "Hold
your noise, you young devil; or it will be the worse for you"; but
fundamentally it means the same thing: that if you compel an adult and
a child to live in one another's company either the adult or the child
will be miserable. There is nothing whatever unnatural or wrong or
shocking in this fact; and there is no harm in it if only it be sensibly
faced and provided for. The mischief that it does at present is
produced by our efforts to ignore it, or to smother it under a heap of
sentimental lies and false pretences.