Unfortunately all this nonsense tends to accumulate as we become more
sympathetic. In many families it is still the custom to treat childhood
frankly as a state of sin, and impudently proclaim the monstrous
principle that little children should be seen and not heard, and to
enforce a set of prison rules designed solely to make cohabitation
with children as convenient as possible for adults without the smallest
regard for the interests, either remote or immediate, of the
children. This system tends to produce a tough, rather brutal, stupid,
unscrupulous class, with a fixed idea that all enjoyment consists in
undetected sinning; and in certain phases of civilization people of this
kind are apt to get the upper hand of more amiable and conscientious
races and classes. They have the ferocity of a chained dog, and are
proud of it. But the end of it is that they are always in chains,
even at the height of their military or political success: they
win everything on condition that they are afraid to enjoy it. Their
civilizations rest on intimidation, which is so necessary to them that
when they cannot find anybody brave enough to intimidate them they
intimidate themselves and live in a continual moral and political panic.
In the end they get found out and bullied. But that is not the point
that concerns us here, which is, that they are in some respects better
brought up than the children of sentimental people who are always
anxious and miserable about their duty to their children, and who end
by neither making their children happy nor having a tolerable life for
themselves. A selfish tyrant you know where to have, and he (or she) at
least does not confuse your affections; but a conscientious and kindly
meddler may literally worry you out of your senses. It is fortunate that
only very few parents are capable of doing what they conceive their duty
continuously or even at all, and that still fewer are tough enough to
ride roughshod over their children at home.