oals
or wash dishes or brush clothes; she treats them as they unconsciously
desire to be treated--as babes.

It may be that Dauvit has a strong mother complex. He often talks of
his mother, and more than once I have heard him say that she was the
best woman he had ever known. It may be that he was unconsciously
looking for the mother in Maggie and the other girls, and failed to
find her. Maggie's remark about the sunset and the dress was not
enough to stifle his love declaration. The soul he longed to find in
Maggie may have been the soul of the mother he knew as an infant . . .
the soul of his ideal woman.

The more I see of men the less importance I pay to their conscious
reasons for attitudes. "I hate Brown; he never washes"; "I dislike
Mrs. Smith; she uses bad language." "Murphy is a rotter; he has no
manners." Statements like these are rationalisations; the real reason
for the dislike lies deeper in every case.

VI

The law courts have re-introduced flogging for criminals. To the best
of my knowledge no member of the law profession has protested. If
there is a reform movement within the law I never heard of it.

The curse of law is that it works according to precedent, and it is
therefore conservative. Our judges hand out sentences in blissful
ignorance of later psychology. Last week a boy of eleven was birched
for holding up another boy of nine on the highway and demanding
tuppence or his life. The attitude of the bench is that fear of
another flogging will prevent that boy from turning highwayman again.
I admit that fear will cure him of that special vice, but what the
bench does not know is that the boy's anti-social energy will take
another form. Every act of man is prompted by a wish, and very often
this wish is unconscious. And all the birching in the world will not
destroy a wish; the most it can do is to change its form.

Without an analysis of the boy no one can tell what unconscious wish
impelled him to turn highwayman, but speaking generally a boy expresses
his self-assertion in terms of anti-social behaviour only when his
education has been bad. I believe that all juvenile delinquency is due
to bad education. Our schools enforce passivity on the child; his
creative energy is bottled up. No boy who has tools and a bench to
work with will express himself by smashing windows. Delinquency is
merely displaced social conduct; the motive of the little boy who
turned highwayman w