Among the worst effects of the unnatural segregation of children in
schools and the equally unnatural constant association of them with
adults in the family is the utter defeat of the vital element in
Christianity. Christ stands in the world for that intuition of the
highest humanity that we, being members one of another, must not
complain, must not scold, must not strike, nor revile nor persecute nor
revenge nor punish. Now family life and school life are, as far as the
moral training of children is concerned, nothing but the deliberate
inculcation of a routine of complaint, scolding, punishment,
persecution, and revenge as the natural and only possible way of dealing
with evil or inconvenience. "Aint nobody to be whopped for this here?"
exclaimed Sam Weller when he saw his employer's name written up on a
stage coach, and conceived the phenomenon as an insult which reflected
on himself. This exclamation of Sam Weller is at once the negation of
Christianity and the beginning and the end of current morality; and so
it will remain as long as the family and the school persist as we know
them: that is, as long as the rights of children are so utterly denied
that nobody will even take the trouble to ascertain what they are, and
coming of age is like the turning of a convict into the street after
twenty-one years penal servitude. Indeed it is worse; for the convict
may have learnt before his conviction how to live in freedom and may
remember how to set about it, however lamed his powers of freedom may
have become through disuse; but the child knows no other way of life but
the slave's way. Born free, as Rousseau says, he has been laid hands on
by slaves from the moment of his birth and brought up as a slave. How is
he, when he is at last set free, to be anything else than the slave he
actually is, clamoring for war, for the lash, for police, prisons, and
scaffolds in a wild panic of delusion that without these things he
is lost. The grown-up Englishman is to the end of his days a badly
brought-up child, beyond belief quarrelsome, petulant, selfish,
destructive, and cowardly: afraid that the Germans will come and enslave
him; that the burglar will come and rob him; that the bicycle or motor
car will run over him; that the smallpox will attack him; and that the
devil will run away with him and empty him out like a sack of coals on a
blazing fire unless his nurse or his parents or his schoolmaster or
his bishop or his judge or his army or his navy will do something to
frighten these bad things away. And this Englishman, without the moral
courage of a louse, will risk his neck for fun fifty times every winter
in the hunting field, and at Badajos sieges and the like will ram his
head into a hole bristling with sword blades rather than be beaten in
the one department in which he has been brought up to consult his own
honor. As a Sportsman (and war is fundamentally the sport of hunting
and fighting the most dangerous of the beasts of prey) he feels free. He
will tell you himself that the true sportsman is never a snob, a coward,
a duffer, a cheat, a thief, or a liar. Curious, is it not, that he has
not the same confidence in other sorts of man?
And even sport is losing its freedom. Soon everybody will be schooled,
mentally and physically, from the cradle to the end of the term of adult
compulsory military service, and finally of compulsory civil service
lasting until the age of superannuation. Always more schooling, more
compulsion. We are to be cured by an excess of the dose that has
poisoned us. Satan is to cast out Satan.