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V. AN EVIL CRY

The fashionable fallacy is that by education we can give people
something that we have not got. To hear people talk one would think
it was some sort of magic chemistry, by which, out of a laborious
hotchpotch of hygienic meals, baths, breathing exercises, fresh air and
freehand drawing, we can produce something splendid by accident; we can
create what we cannot conceive. These pages have, of course, no other
general purpose than to point out that we cannot create anything good
until we have conceived it. It is odd that these people, who in the
matter of heredity are so sullenly attached to law, in the matter of
environment seem almost to believe in miracle. They insist that nothing
but what was in the bodies of the parents can go to make the bodies of
the children. But they seem somehow to think that things can get into
the heads of the children which were not in the heads of the parents,
or, indeed, anywhere else.

There has arisen in this connection a foolish and wicked cry typical of
the confusion. I mean the cry, "Save the children." It is, of course,
part of that modern morbidity that insists on treating the State (which
is the home of man) as a sort of desperate expedient in time of panic.
This terrified opportunism is also the origin of the Socialist and other
schemes. Just as they would collect and share all the food as men do in
a famine, so they would divide the children from their fathers, as men
do in a shipwreck. That a human community might conceivably not be in a
condition of famine or shipwreck never seems to cross their minds. This
cry of "Save the children" has in it the hateful implication that it is
impossible to save the fathers; in other words, that many millions of
grown-up, sane, responsible and self-supporting Europeans are to be
treated as dirt or debris and swept away out of the discussion; called
dipsomaniacs because they drink in public houses instead of private
houses; called unemployables because nobody knows how to get them work;
called dullards if they still adhere to conventions, and called loafers
if they still love liberty. Now I am concerned, first and last, to
maintain that unless you can save the fathers, you cannot save the
children; that at present we cannot save others, for we cannot save
ourselves. We cannot teach citizenship if we are not citizens; we cannot
free others if we have forgotten the appetite of freedom. Education is
only truth in