d. So the
absence of a genial mental atmosphere is not commonly recognised by
children who have never known it. Young people have a marvellous faculty
of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances. Even if they
are unhappy--very unhappy--it is astonishing how easily they can be
prevented from finding it out, or at any rate from attributing it to any
other cause than their own sinfulness.
To parents who wish to lead a quiet life I would say: Tell your children
that they are very naughty--much naughtier than most children. Point to
the young people of some acquaintances as models of perfection and
impress your own children with a deep sense of their own inferiority. You
carry so many more guns than they do that they cannot fight you. This is
called moral influence, and it will enable you to bounce them as much as
you please. They think you know and they will not have yet caught you
lying often enough to suspect that you are not the unworldly and
scrupulously truthful person which you represent yourself to be; nor yet
will they know how great a coward you are, nor how soon you will run
away, if they fight you with persistency and judgement. You keep the
dice and throw them both for your children and yourself. Load them then,
for you can easily manage to stop your children from examining them. Tell
them how singularly indulgent you are; insist on the incalculable benefit
you conferred upon them, firstly in bringing them into the world at all,
but more particularly in bringing them into it as your own children
rather than anyone else's. Say that you have their highest interests at
stake whenever you are out of temper and wish to make yourself unpleasant
by way of balm to your soul. Harp much upon these highest interests.
Feed them spiritually upon such brimstone and treacle as the late Bishop
of Winchester's Sunday stories. You hold all the trump cards, or if you
do not you can filch them; if you play them with anything like judgement
you will find yourselves heads of happy, united, God-fearing families,
even as did my old friend Mr Pontifex. True, your children will probably
find out all about it some day, but not until too late to be of much
service to them or inconvenience to yourself.
Some satirists have complained of life inasmuch as all the pleasures
belong to the fore part of it and we must see them dwindle till we are
left, it may be, with the miseries of a decrepit old age.
To me it seem
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