, when the child's parents are destitute or
not to be found, bread, lodging, and clothing are provided. It is true
that they are provided grudgingly and on conditions infamous enough to
draw down abundant fire from Heaven upon us every day in the shape of
crime and disease and vice; but still the practice of keeping children
barely alive at the charge of the community is established; and there is
no need for me to argue about it. I propose only two extensions of the
practice. One is to provide for all the child's reasonable human wants,
on which point, if you differ from me, I shall take leave to say that
you are socially a fool and personally an inhuman wretch. The other is
that these wants should be supplied in complete freedom from compulsory
schooling or compulsory anything except restraint from crime, though,
as they can be supplied only by social organization, the child must be
conscious of and subject to the conditions of that organization, which
may involve such portions of adult responsibility and duty as a child
may be able to bear according to its age, and which will in any case
prevent it from forming the vagabond and anarchist habit of mind.

One more exception might be necessary: compulsory freedom. I am sure
that a child should not be imprisoned in a school. I am not so sure that
it should not sometimes be driven out into the open--imprisoned in the
woods and on the mountains, as it were. For there are frowsty children,
just as there are frowsty adults, who dont want freedom. This morbid
result of over-domestication would, let us hope, soon disappear with its
cause.

Mobilization

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