it with authority. It cannot
really be self-evident or it never could have been compulsory. But this
is in modern practice a very mild case. In modern practice the
free educationists forbid far more things than the old-fashioned
educationists. A person with a taste for paradox (if any such shameless
creature could exist) might with some plausibility maintain concerning
all our expansion since the failure of Luther's frank paganism and its
replacement by Calvin's Puritanism, that all this expansion has not
been an expansion, but the closing in of a prison, so that less and less
beautiful and humane things have been permitted. The Puritans destroyed
images; the Rationalists forbade fairy tales. Count Tostoi practically
issued one of his papal encyclicals against music; and I have heard of
modern educationists who forbid children to play with tin soldiers. I
remember a meek little madman who came up to me at some Socialist soiree
or other, and asked me to use my influence (have I any influence?)
against adventure stories for boys. It seems they breed an appetite for
blood. But never mind that; one must keep one's temper in this madhouse.
I need only insist here that these things, even if a just deprivation,
are a deprivation. I do not deny that the old vetoes and punishments
were often idiotic and cruel; though they are much more so in a country
like England (where in practice only a rich man decrees the punishment
and only a poor man receives it) than in countries with a clearer
popular tradition--such as Russia. In Russia flogging is often inflicted
by peasants on a peasant. In modern England flogging can only in
practice be inflicted by a gentleman on a very poor man. Thus only a
few days ago as I write a small boy (a son of the poor, of course) was
sentenced to flogging and imprisonment for five years for having picked
up a small piece of coal which the experts value at 5d. I am entirely
on the side of such liberals and humanitarians as have protested against
this almost bestial ignorance about boys. But I do think it a little
unfair that these humanitarians, who excuse boys for being robbers,
should denounce them for playing at robbers. I do think that those who
understand a guttersnipe playing with a piece of coal might, by a sudden
spurt of imagination, understand him playing with a tin soldier. To
sum it up in one sentence: I think my meek little madman might have
understood that there is many a boy who would rather