The difficulty with children is that they need protection from risks
they are too young to understand, and attacks they can neither avoid
nor resist. You may on academic grounds allow a child to snatch glowing
coals from the fire once. You will not do it twice. The risks of
liberty we must let everyone take; but the risks of ignorance and
self-helplessness are another matter. Not only children but adults
need protection from them. At present adults are often exposed to risks
outside their knowledge or beyond their comprehension or powers of
resistance or foresight: for example, we have to look on every day
at marriages or financial speculations that may involve far worse
consequences than burnt fingers. And just as it is part of the business
of adults to protect children, to feed them, clothe them, shelter them,
and shift for them in all sorts of ways until they are able to shift for
themselves, it is coming more and more to be seen that this is true not
only of the relation between adults and children, but between adults and
adults. We shall not always look on indifferently at foolish marriages
and financial speculations, nor allow dead men to control live
communities by ridiculous wills and living heirs to squander and ruin
great estates, nor tolerate a hundred other absurd liberties that
we allow today because we are too lazy to find out the proper way to
interfere. But the interference must be regulated by some theory of the
individual's rights. Though the right to live is absolute, it is not
unconditional. If a man is unbearably mischievous, he must be killed.
This is a mere matter of necessity, like the killing of a man-eating
tiger in a nursery, a venomous snake in the garden, or a fox in the
poultry yard. No society could be constructed on the assumption that
such extermination is a violation of the creature's right to live, and
therefore must not be allowed. And then at once arises the danger into
which morality has led us: the danger of persecution. One Christian
spreading his doctrines may seem more mischievous than a dozen thieves:
throw him therefore to the lions. A lying or disobedient child may
corrupt a whole generation and make human Society impossible: therefore
thrash the vice out of him. And so on until our whole system of
abortion, intimidation, tyranny, cruelty and the rest is in full swing
again.