A Treatise on Parents and Children

The difficulty with children is that they need protection from risks / they are too young to understand, and attacks they can neither avoid / nor resist. You may on academic grounds allow a child to snatch glowing / coals from the fire once. You will not do it twice. The risks of / liberty we must let everyone take; but the risks of ignorance and / self-helplessness are another matter. Not only children but adults / need protection from them. At present adults are often exposed to risks / outside their knowledge or beyond their comprehension or powers of / resistance or foresight: for example, we have to look on every day / at marriages or financial speculations that may involve far worse / consequences than burnt fingers. And just as it is part of the business / of adults to protect children, to feed them, clothe them, shelter them, / and shift for them in all sorts of ways until they are able to shift for / themselves, it is coming more and more to be seen that this is true not / only of the relation between adults and children, but between adults and / adults. We shall not always look on indifferently at foolish marriages / and financial speculations, nor allow dead men to control live / communities by ridiculous wills and living heirs to squander and ruin / great estates, nor tolerate a hundred other absurd liberties that / we allow today because we are too lazy to find out the proper way to / interfere. But the interference must be regulated by some theory of the / individual's rights. Though the right to live is absolute, it is not / unconditional. If a man is unbearably mischievous, he must be killed.

This is a mere matter of necessity, like the killing of a man-eating / tiger in a nursery, a venomous snake in the garden, or a fox in the / poultry yard. No society could be constructed on the assumption that / such extermination is a violation of the creature's right to live, and / therefore must not be allowed. And then at once arises the danger into / which morality has led us: the danger of persecution. One Christian / spreading his doctrines may seem more mischievous than a dozen thieves: / throw him therefore to the lions. A lying or disobedient child may / corrupt a whole generation and make human Society impossible: therefore / thrash the vice out of him. And so on until our whole system of / abortion, intimidation, tyranny, cruelty and the rest is in full swing / again.