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Those who see no prospect held out to them by this except a
country in which all the children shall be roaming savages, should consider, first,
whether their condition would be any worse than that of the little caged savages of today,
and second, whether either children or adults are so apt to run wild that it is necessary
to tether them fast to one neighborhood to prevent a general dissolution of society. My
own observation leads me to believe that we are not half mobilized enough. True, I cannot
deny that we are more mobile than we were. You will still find in the home counties old
men who have never been to London, and who tell you that they once went to Winchester or
St Albans much as if they had been to the South Pole; but they are not so common as the
clerk who has been to Paris or to Lovely Lucerne, and who "goes away somewhere"
when he has a holiday. His grandfather never had a holiday, and, if he had, would no more
have dreamed of crossing the Channel than of taking a box at the Opera. But with all
allowance for the Polytechnic excursion and the tourist agency, our inertia is still
appalling. I confess to having once spent nine years in London without putting my nose
outside it; and though this was better, perhaps, than the restless globe-trotting
vagabondage of the idle rich, wandering from hotel to hotel and never really living
anywhere, yet I should no more have done it if I had been properly mobilized in my
childhood than I should have worn the same suit of clothes all that time (which, by the
way, I very nearly did, my professional income not having as yet begun to sprout). There
are masses of people who could afford at least a trip to Margate, and a good many who
could afford a trip round the world, who are more immovable than Aldgate pump. To others,
who would move if they knew how, travelling is surrounded with imaginary difficulties and
terrors. In short, the difficulty is not to fix people, but to root them up. We keep
repeating the silly proverb that a rolling stone gathers no moss, as if moss were a
desirable parasite. What we mean is that a vagabond does not prosper. Even this is not
true, if prosperity means enjoyment as well as responsibility and money. The real misery
of vagabondage is the misery of having nothing to do and nowhere to go, the misery of
being derelict of God and Man, the misery of the idle, poor or rich. And this is one of
the miseries of unoccupied childhood. The unoccupied adult, thus afflicted, tries many
distractions which are, to say the least, unsuited to children. But one of them, the
distraction of seeing the world, is innocent and beneficial. Also it is childish, being a
continuation of what nurses call "taking notice," by which a child becomes
experienced. It is pitiable nowadays to see men and women doing after the age of 45 all
the travelling and sightseeing they should have done before they were 15. Mere wondering
and staring at things is an important part of a child's education: that is why children
can be thoroughly mobilized without making vagabonds of them. A vagabond is at home
nowhere because he wanders: a child should wander because it ought to be at home
everywhere. And if it has its papers and its passports, and gets what it requires not by
begging and pilfering, but from responsible agents of the community as of right, and with
some formal acknowledgment of the obligations it is incurring and a knowledge of the fact
that these obligations are being recorded: if, further, certain qualifications are exacted
before it is promoted from permission to go as far as its legs will carry it to using
mechanical aids to locomotion, it can roam without much danger of gypsification.
Under such circumstances the boy or girl could always run away, and
never be lost; and on no other conditions can a child be free without being also a
homeless outcast.
Parents could also run away from disagreeable children or drive them
out of doors or even drop their acquaintance, temporarily or permanently, without
inhumanity. Thus both parties would be on their good behavior, and not, as at present, on
their filial or parental behavior, which, like all unfree behavior, is mostly bad
behavior.
As to what other results might follow, we had better wait and see; for
nobody now alive can imagine what customs and institutions would grow up in societies of
free children. Child laws and child fashions, child manners and child morals are now not
tolerated; but among free children there would certainly be surprising developments in
this direction. I do not think there would be any danger of free children behaving as
badly as grown-up people do now because they have never been free. They could hardly
behave worse, anyhow. |
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