g
you know. There must be a much more personal reason than that."

"Rot!" he said. "Anyway, what is the reason?"

"I don't know, Mac; it would take months of research to discover it. I
can't explain your psychology, but I'll tell you something about my
own. These swagger corduroys I'm wearing . . . when I bought them
someone asked me why I chose corduroy, and I at once answered:
'Economy! They'll last ten years!' But that wasn't the real reason, I
bought them because I wanted to have folk stare at me. I've got an
inferiority complex, that is an inner feeling of inferiority. To
compensate for it I go and order a suit that will make people look at
me; in short, that I may be the centre of all eyes, and thus gain a
feeling of outward superiority."

This sent Mac off into a roar of laughter.

"You're daft, man!" he roared.

After a minute or two he said; "But what has all this to do with Tom
Murray?"

"A lot," I said seriously. "You think you whack Tom because you must
have discipline, but you whack him for a different reason. In your
deep unconscious mind you are an infant. You want to show your
self-assertion just as a kid does. You leather Tom because you've
never outgrown your seven-year-old stage. On market-day, when Tom
walks behind a drove and whacks the stots over the hips with a stick,
he is doing exactly what you did this afternoon. You are both infants."

I have had to give up lecturing Mac, for he always takes me as a huge
joke. He is a good fellow, but he has the wonderful gift of being
blind to anything that might make him reconsider his values. Many
people protect themselves in the same way--by laughing. I have more
than once seen an alcoholic laugh heartily at his wrecked home and lost
job.

II.

What an amount of excellent material Mac and his kind are spoiling.
Tom Murray is a fine lad, full of energy and initiative, but he has to
sit passive at a desk doing work that does not interest him. His
creative faculties have no outlet at all during the day, and naturally
when free from authority at nights he expresses his creative interest
anti-socially. He nearly wrecked the five-twenty the other night; he
tied a huge iron bolt to the rails. Mac called it devilment, but it
was merely curiosity. He had had innumerable pins and farthings
flattened on the line, and he wanted to see what the engine really
could do.

There is devilment in some of Tom's activities, for example