h is held to
bind the child as much as though he had signed it himself.

Even this, however, does not fully content them, for they feel a little
uneasy until they have got the child's own signature after all. So when
he is about fourteen, these good people partly bribe him by promises of
greater liberty and good things, and partly intimidate him through their
great power of making themselves actively unpleasant to him, so that
though there is a show of freedom made, there is really none; they also
use the offices of the teachers in the Colleges of Unreason, till at
last, in one way or another, they take very good care that he shall sign
the paper by which he professes to have been a free agent in coming into
the world, and to take all the responsibility of having done so on to his
own shoulders. And yet, though this document is obviously the most
important which any one can sign in his whole life, they will have him do
so at an age when neither they nor the law will for many a year allow any
one else to bind him to the smallest obligation, no matter how
righteously he may owe it, because they hold him too young to know what
he is about, and do not consider it fair that he should commit himself to
anything that may prejudice him in after years.

I own that all this seemed rather hard, and not of a piece with the many
admirable institutions existing among them. I once ventured to say a
part of what I thought about it to one of the Professors of Unreason. I
did it very tenderly, but his justification of the system was quite out
of my comprehension. I remember asking him whether he did not think it
would do harm to a lad's principles, by weakening his sense of the
sanctity of his word and of truth generally, that he should be led into
entering upon a solemn declaration as to the truth of things about which
all that he can certainly know is that he knows nothing--whether, in
fact, the teachers who so led him, or who taught anything as a certainty
of which they were themselves uncertain, were not earning their living by
impairing the truth-sense of their pupils (a delicate organisation
mostly), and by vitiating one of their most sacred instincts.

The Professor, who was a delightful person, seemed greatly surprised at
the view which I took, but it had no influence with him whatsoever. No
one, he answered, expected that the boy either would or could know all
that he said he knew; but the world was full of compromises; a