A Treatise on Parents and Children

Of the many wild absurdities of our existing social order perhaps the / most grotesque is the costly and strictly enforced reservation of large / tracts of country as deer forests and breeding grounds for pheasants / whilst there is so little provision of the kind made for children. / I have more than once thought of trying to introduce the shooting / of children as a sport, as the children would then be preserved very / carefully for ten months in the year, thereby reducing their death rate / far more than the fusillades of the sportsmen during the other two would / raise it. At present the killing of a fox except by a pack of foxhounds / is regarded with horror; but you may and do kill children in a hundred / and fifty ways provided you do not shoot them or set a pack of dogs on / them. It must be admitted that the foxes have the best of it; and indeed / a glance at our pheasants, our deer, and our children will convince the / most sceptical that the children have decidedly the worst of it.

This much hope, however, can be extracted from the present state of / things. It is so fantastic, so mad, so apparently impossible, that no / scheme of reform need ever henceforth be discredited on the ground that / it is fantastic or mad or apparently impossible. It is the sensible / schemes, unfortunately, that are hopeless in England. Therefore I have / great hopes that my own views, though fundamentally sensible, can be / made to appear fantastic enough to have a chance.