A Treatise on Parents and Children

When we set to work at a Constitution to secure freedom for children, we / had better bear in mind that the children may not be at all obliged to / us for our pains. Rousseau said that men are born free; and this saying, / in its proper bearings, was and is a great and true saying; yet let it / not lead us into the error of supposing that all men long for freedom / and embrace it when it is offered to them. On the contrary, it has to / be forced on them; and even then they will give it the slip if it is not / religiously inculcated and strongly safeguarded.

Besides, men are born docile, and must in the nature of things remain so / with regard to everything they do not understand. Now political science / and the art of government are among the things they do not understand, / and indeed are not at present allowed to understand. They can be / enslaved by a system, as we are at present, because it happens to be / there, and nobody understands it. An intelligently worked Capitalist / system, as Comte saw, would give us all that most of us are intelligent / enough to want. What makes it produce such unspeakably vile results is / that it is an automatic system which is as little understood by those / who profit by it in money as by those who are starved and degraded by / it: our millionaires and statesmen are manifestly no more "captains / of industry" or scientific politicians than our bookmakers are / mathematicians. For some time past a significant word has been coming / into use as a substitute for Destiny, Fate, and Providence. It is "The / Machine": the machine that has no god in it. Why do governments do / nothing in spite of reports of Royal Commissions that establish the most / frightful urgency? Why do our philanthropic millionaires do nothing, / though they are ready to throw bucketfuls of gold into the streets? The / Machine will not let them. Always the Machine. In short, they dont know / how.