ponsible 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.

Children's Rights and Parents' Wrongs

A very distinguished man once assured a mother of my acquaintance that
she would never know what it meant to be hurt until she was hurt through
her children. Children are extremely cruel without intending it; and
in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the reason is that they do not
conceive their elders as having any human feelings. Serve the elders
right, perhaps, for posing as superhuman! The penalty of the impostor
is not that he is found out (he very seldom is) but that he is taken
for what he pretends to be, and treated as such. And to be treated as
anything but what you really are may seem pleasant to the imagination
when the treatment is above your merits; but in actual experience it
is often quite the reverse. When I was a very small boy, my romantic
imagination, stimulated by early doses of fiction, led me to brag to a
still smaller boy so outrageously that he, being a simple soul, really
believed me to be an invincible hero. I cannot remember whether t