or his own credit let
his son go in rags. Also, in a very large section of the population,
parents finally become dependent on their children. Thus there are
checks on child slavery which do not exist, or are less powerful, in the
case of manual and industrial slavery. Sensationally bad cases fall into
two classes, which are really the same class: namely, the children
whose parents are excessively addicted to the sensual luxury of petting
children, and the children whose parents are excessively addicted to the
sensual luxury of physically torturing them. There is a Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children which has effectually made an end of
our belief that mothers are any more to be trusted than stepmothers, or
fathers than slave-drivers. And there is a growing body of law designed
to prevent parents from using their children ruthlessly to make money
for the household. Such legislation has always been furiously resisted
by the parents, even when the horrors of factory slavery were at
their worst; and the extension of such legislation at present would be
impossible if it were not that the parents affected by it cannot control
a majority of votes in Parliament. In domestic life a great deal of
service is done by children, the girls acting as nursemaids and general
servants, and the lads as errand boys. In the country both boys and
girls do a substantial share of farm labor. This is why it is necessary
to coerce poor parents to send their children to school, though in the
relatively small class which keeps plenty of servants it is impossible
to induce parents to keep their children at home instead of paying
schoolmasters to take them off their hands.

It appears then that the bond of affection between parents and children
does not save children from the slavery that denial of rights involves
in adult political relations. It sometimes intensifies it, sometimes
mitigates it; but on the whole children and parents confront one another
as two classes in which all the political power is on one side; and
the results are not at all unlike what they would be if there were no
immediate consanguinity between them, and one were white and the other
black, or one enfranchised and the other disenfranchised, or one ranked
as gentle and the other simple. Not that Nature counts for nothing in
the case and political rights for everything. But a denial of political
rights, and the resultant delivery of one class into the mastery of