Those who see no prospect held out to them by this except a country in
which all the children shall be roaming savages, should consider, first,
whether their condition would be any worse than that of the little caged
savages of today, and second, whether either children or adults are
so apt to run wild that it is necessary to tether them fast to one
neighborhood to prevent a general dissolution of society. My own
observation leads me to believe that we are not half mobilized enough.
True, I cannot deny that we are more mobile than we were. You will still
find in the home counties old men who have never been to London, and who
tell you that they once went to Winchester or St Albans much as if they
had been to the South Pole; but they are not so common as the clerk who
has been to Paris or to Lovely Lucerne, and who "goes away somewhere"
when he has a holiday. His grandfather never had a holiday, and, if he
had, would no more have dreamed of crossing the Channel than of taking
a box at the Opera. But with all allowance for the Polytechnic excursion
and the tourist agency, our inertia is still appalling. I confess to
having once spent nine years in London without putting my nose
outside it; and though this was better, perhaps, than the restless
globe-trotting vagabondage of the idle rich, wandering from hotel to
hotel and never really living anywhere, yet I should no more have done
it if I had been properly mobilized in my childhood than I should have
worn the same suit of clothes all that time (which, by the way, I very
nearly did, my professional income not having as yet begun to sprout).
There are masses of people who could afford at least a trip to Margate,
and a good many who could afford a trip round the world, who are more
immovable than Aldgate pump. To others, who would move if they knew how,
travelling is surrounded with imaginary difficulties and terrors. In
short, the difficulty is not to fix people, but to root them up. We keep
repeating the silly proverb that a rolling stone gathers no moss, as if
moss were a desirable parasite. What we mean is that a vagabond does not
prosper. Even this is not true, if prosperity means enjoyment as well as
responsibility and money. The real misery of vagabondage is the misery
of having nothing to do and nowhere to go, the misery of being derelict
of God and Man, the misery of the idle, poor or rich. And this is one
of the miseries of unoccupied childhood. The unoccupied adult, thus
afflicted, tries many distractions which are, to say the least, unsuited
to children. But one of them, the distraction of seeing the world, is
innocent and beneficial. Also it is childish, being a continuation of
what nurses call "taking notice," by which a child becomes experienced.
It is pitiable nowadays to see men and women doing after the age of 45
all the travelling and sightseeing they should have done before they
were 15. Mere wondering and staring at things is an important part of
a child's education: that is why children can be thoroughly mobilized
without making vagabonds of them. A vagabond is at home nowhere because
he wanders: a child should wander because it ought to be at home
everywhere. And if it has its papers and its passports, and gets what
it requires not by begging and pilfering, but from responsible agents
of the community as of right, and with some formal acknowledgment of
the obligations it is incurring and a knowledge of the fact that these
obligations are being recorded: if, further, certain qualifications are
exacted before it is promoted from permission to go as far as its
legs will carry it to using mechanical aids to locomotion, it can roam
without much danger of gypsification.
Under such circumstances the boy or girl could always run away, and
never be lost; and on no other conditions can a child be free without
being also a homeless outcast.
Parents could also run away from disagreeable children or drive them out
of doors or even drop their acquaintance, temporarily or permanently,
without inhumanity. Thus both parties would be on their good behavior,
and not, as at present, on their filial or parental behavior, which,
like all unfree behavior, is mostly bad behavior.
As to what other results might follow, we had better wait and see; for
nobody now alive can imagine what customs and institutions would grow
up in societies of free children. Child laws and child fashions, child
manners and child morals are now not tolerated; but among free children
there would certainly be surprising developments in this direction. I do
not think there would be any danger of free children behaving as badly
as grown-up people do now because they have never been free. They could
hardly behave worse, anyhow.