ing an artificial personality upon me. Only in
a very limited sense did they want me. What they wanted was something
that could be made out of me by extensive suppressions and additions.
They ignored the fact that I had been born with a shape of my own; they
were resolved I should be pressed into a mould and cast.

It was not that they wanted outer conformity to certain needs and
standards--that, I think, would be a reasonable thing enough to
demand--but they wanted me to subdue my most private thoughts to their
ideals. My nurses and my governesses would rate me for my very feelings,
would clamor for gratitude and reproach me bitterly for betraying that I
did not at some particular moment--love.

(Only yesterday I heard Mademoiselle Potin doing that very same thing to
you. "It is that you do not care, Master Steve. It is that you do not
care. You do not want to care.")

They went too far in that invasion of my personal life, but I perceive
quite clearly the present need for most of the process of moulding and
subjugation that children must undergo. Human society is a new thing
upon the earth, an invention of the last ten thousand years. Man is a
creature as yet not freely and instinctively gregarious; in his more
primordial state he must have been an animal of very small groups and
limited associations, an animal rather self-centred and fierce, and he
is still but imperfectly adapted either morally or physically to the
wider social life his crowding interactions force upon him. He still
learns speech and computation and civility and all the devices of this
artificially extended and continually broadening tribal life with an
extreme reluctance. He has to be shaped in the interests of the species,
I admit, to the newer conditions; the growing social order must be
protected from the keen edge of his still savage individuality, and he
must be trained in his own interests to save himself from the
destruction of impossible revolts. But how clumsily is the thing done!
How we are caught and jammed and pressed and crippled into citizenship!
How excessive and crushing is the suppression, and how inadequate!

Every child feels that, even if every child does not clearly know it.
Every child presently begins to hide itself from the confused tyrannies
of the social process, from the searching inspections and injunctions
and interferences of parent and priest and teacher.

"I have got to be _so_," we all say deep down in ourselves