mmon sense why do we always treat children
on the assumption that the man is father to the child? Oh, these
fathers! And we are not content with fathers: we must have godfathers,
forgetting that the child is godfather to the man. Has it ever struck
you as curious that in a country where the first article of belief is
that every child is born with a godfather whom we all call "our father
which art in heaven," two very limited individual mortals should
be allowed to appear at its baptism and explain that they are its
godparents, and that they will look after its salvation until it is no
longer a child. I had a godmother who made herself responsible in this
way for me. She presented me with a Bible with a gilt clasp and edges,
larger than the Bibles similarly presented to my sisters, because my sex
entitled me to a heavier article. I must have seen that lady at least
four times in the twenty years following. She never alluded to my
salvation in any way. People occasionally ask me to act as godfather to
their children with a levity which convinces me that they have not the
faintest notion that it involves anything more than calling the helpless
child George Bernard without regard to the possibility that it may grow
up in the liveliest abhorrence of my notions.

A person with a turn for logic might argue that if God is the Father of
all men, and if the child is father to the man, it follows that the true
representative of God at the christening is the child itself. But such
posers are unpopular, because they imply that our little customs, or,
as we often call them, our religion, mean something, or must originally
have meant something, and that we understand and believe that something.

However, my business is not to make confusion worse confounded, but to
clear it up. Only, it is as well to begin by a sample of current thought
and practice which shews that on the subject of children we are very
deeply confused. On the whole, whatever our theory or no theory may
be, our practice is to treat the child as the property of its immediate
physical parents, and to allow them to do what they like with it as far
as it will let them. It has no rights and no liberties: in short, its
condition is that which adults recognize as the most miserable and
dangerous politically possible for themselves: namely, the condition of
slavery. For its alleviation we trust to the natural affection of the
parties, and to public opinion. A father cannot f