Of the many wild absurdities of our existing social order perhaps the
most grotesque is the costly and strictly enforced reservation of large
tracts of country as deer forests and breeding grounds for pheasants
whilst there is so little provision of the kind made for children.
I have more than once thought of trying to introduce the shooting
of children as a sport, as the children would then be preserved very
carefully for ten months in the year, thereby reducing their death rate
far more than the fusillades of the sportsmen during the other two would
raise it. At present the killing of a fox except by a pack of foxhounds
is regarded with horror; but you may and do kill children in a hundred
and fifty ways provided you do not shoot them or set a pack of dogs on
them. It must be admitted that the foxes have the best of it; and indeed
a glance at our pheasants, our deer, and our children will convince the
most sceptical that the children have decidedly the worst of it.
This much hope, however, can be extracted from the present state of
things. It is so fantastic, so mad, so apparently impossible, that no
scheme of reform need ever henceforth be discredited on the ground that
it is fantastic or mad or apparently impossible. It is the sensible
schemes, unfortunately, that are hopeless in England. Therefore I have
great hopes that my own views, though fundamentally sensible, can be
made to appear fantastic enough to have a chance.
First, then, I lay it down as a prime condition of sane society, obvious
as such to anyone but an idiot, that in any decent community, children
should find in every part of their native country, food, clothing,
lodging, instruction, and parental kindness for the asking. For the
matter of that, so should adults; but the two cases differ in that as
these commodities do not grow on the bushes, the adults cannot have
them unless they themselves organize and provide the supply, whereas the
children must have them as if by magic, with nothing to do but rub the
lamp, like Aladdin, and have their needs satisfied.