The world wags in spite of its schools and its families because both
schools and families are mostly very largely anarchic: parents and
schoolmasters are good-natured or weak or lazy; and children are docile
and affectionate and very shortwinded in their fits of naughtiness; and
so most families slummock along and muddle through until the children
cease to be children. In the few cases when the parties are energetic
and determined, the child is crushed or the parent is reduced to a
cipher, as the case may be. When the opposed forces are neither of them
strong enough to annihilate the other, there is serious trouble: that
is how we get those feuds between parent and child which recur to our
memory so ironically when we hear people sentimentalizing about natural
affection. We even get tragedies; for there is nothing so tragic to
contemplate or so devastating to suffer as the oppression of will
without conscience; and the whole tendency of our family and school
system is to set the will of the parent and the school despot above
conscience as something that must be deferred to abjectly and absolutely
for its own sake.
The strongest, fiercest force in nature is human will. It is the highest
organization we know of the will that has created the whole universe.
Now all honest civilization, religion, law, and convention is an attempt
to keep this force within beneficent bounds. What corrupts civilization,
religion, law, and convention (and they are at present pretty nearly
as corrupt as they dare) is the constant attempts made by the wills of
individuals and classes to thwart the wills and enslave the powers
of other individuals and classes. The powers of the parent and the
schoolmaster, and of their public analogues the lawgiver and the
judge, become instruments of tyranny in the hands of those who are too
narrow-minded to understand law and exercise judgment; and in their
hands (with us they mostly fall into such hands) law becomes tyranny.
And what is a tyrant? Quite simply a person who says to another person,
young or old, "You shall do as I tell you; you shall make what I want;
you shall profess my creed; you shall have no will of your own; and
your powers shall be at the disposal of my will." It has come to this at
last: that the phrase "she has a will of her own," or "he has a will
of his own" has come to denote a person of exceptional obstinacy and
self-assertion. And even persons of good natural disposition, if
brought up to expect such deference, are roused to unreasoning fury,
and sometimes to the commission of atrocious crimes, by the slightest
challenge to their authority. Thus a laborer may be dirty, drunken,
untruthful, slothful, untrustworthy in every way without exhausting the
indulgence of the country house. But let him dare to be "disrespectful"
and he is a lost man, though he be the cleanest, soberest, most
diligent, most veracious, most trustworthy man in the county. Dickens's
instinct for detecting social cankers never served him better than when
he shewed us Mrs Heep teaching her son to "be umble," knowing that if he
carried out that precept he might be pretty well anything else he liked.
The maintenance of deference to our wills becomes a mania which will
carry the best of us to any extremity. We will allow a village of
Egyptian fellaheen or Indian tribesmen to live the lowest life they
please among themselves without molestation; but let one of them slay
an Englishman or even strike him on the strongest provocation, and
straightway we go stark mad, burning and destroying, shooting and
shelling, flogging and hanging, if only such survivors as we may leave
are thoroughly cowed in the presence of a man with a white face. In
the committee room of a local council or city corporation, the humblest
employees of the committee find defenders if they complain of harsh
treatment. Gratuities are voted, indulgences and holidays are pleaded
for, delinquencies are excused in the most sentimental manner provided
only the employee, however patent a hypocrite or incorrigible a slacker,
is hat in hand. But let the most obvious measure of justice be demanded
by the secretary of a Trade Union in terms which omit all expressions
of subservience, and it is with the greatest difficulty that the
cooler-headed can defeat angry motions that the letter be thrown into
the waste paper basket and the committee proceed to the next business.