A Treatise on Parents and Children

It seems hopeless. Anarchists are tempted to preach a violent and / implacable resistance to all law as the only remedy; and the result of / that speedily is that people welcome any tyranny that will rescue them / from chaos. But there is really no need to choose between anarchy and / tyranny. A quite reasonable state of things is practicable if we proceed / on human assumptions and not on academic ones. If adults will frankly / give up their claim to know better than children what the purposes / of the Life Force are, and treat the child as an experiment like / themselves, and possibly a more successful one, and at the same time / relinquish their monstrous parental claims to personal private property / in children, the rest must be left to common sense. It is our attitude, / our religion, that is wrong. A good beginning might be made by enacting / that any person dictating a piece of conduct to a child or to anyone / else as the will of God, or as absolutely right, should be dealt with / as a blasphemer: as, indeed, guilty of the unpardonable sin against the / Holy Ghost. If the penalty were death, it would rid us at once of that / scourge of humanity, the amateur Pope. As an Irish Protestant, I raise / the cry of No Popery with hereditary zest. We are overrun with Popes.

From curates and governesses, who may claim a sort of professional / standing, to parents and uncles and nurserymaids and school teachers / and wiseacres generally, there are scores of thousands of human insects / groping through our darkness by the feeble phosphorescence of their own / tails, yet ready at a moment's notice to reveal the will of God on every / possible subject; to explain how and why the universe was made (in my / youth they added the exact date) and the circumstances under which / it will cease to exist; to lay down precise rules of right and wrong / conduct; to discriminate infallibly between virtuous and vicious / character; and all this with such certainty that they are prepared to / visit all the rigors of the law, and all the ruinous penalties of social / ostracism on people, however harmless their actions maybe who venture / to laugh at their monstrous conceit or to pay their assumptions the / extravagant compliment of criticizing them. As to children, who shall / say what canings and birchings and terrifyings and threats of hell fire / and impositions and humiliations and petty imprisonings and sendings / to bed and standing in corners and the like they have suffered because / their parents and guardians and teachers knew everything so much better / than Socrates or Solon?