murdered by
his boys; and for reasons which were never made public it was at
first decided not to prosecute the murderers. Yet all these flogging
schoolmasters and orphanage fiends and baby farmers are "lovers of
children." They are really child fanciers (like bird fanciers or dog
fanciers) by irresistible natural predilection, never happy unless they
are surrounded by their victims, and always certain to make their living
by accepting the custody of children, no matter how many alternative
occupations may be available. And bear in mind that they are only
the extreme instances of what is commonly called natural affection,
apparently because it is obviously unnatural.

The really natural feeling of adults for children in the long prosaic
intervals between the moments of affectionate impulse is just that
feeling that leads them to avoid their care and constant company as a
burden beyond bearing, and to pretend that the places they send them to
are well conducted, beneficial, and indispensable to the success of the
children in after life. The true cry of the kind mother after her little
rosary of kisses is "Run away, darling." It is nicer than "Hold
your noise, you young devil; or it will be the worse for you"; but
fundamentally it means the same thing: that if you compel an adult and
a child to live in one another's company either the adult or the child
will be miserable. There is nothing whatever unnatural or wrong or
shocking in this fact; and there is no harm in it if only it be sensibly
faced and provided for. The mischief that it does at present is
produced by our efforts to ignore it, or to smother it under a heap of
sentimental lies and false pretences.

Childhood as a State of Sin

Unfortunately all this nonsense tends to accumulate as we become more
sympathetic. In many families it is still the custom to treat childhood
frankly as a state of sin, and impudently proclaim the monstrous
principle that little children should be seen and not heard, and to
enforce a set of prison rules designed solely to make cohabitation
with children as convenient as possible for adults without the smallest
regard for the interests, either remote or immediate, of the
children. This system tends to produce a tough, rather brutal, stupid,
unscrupulous class, with a fixed idea that all enjoyment consists in
undetected sinning; and in certain phases of civilization people of this
kind are apt to get the upper hand of more amiab