the fact that it is on the lips of every nurserymaid does not excuse it
in the least. Dickens tells us of a nurserymaid who elaborated it into
"If you do that, angels wont never love you." I remember a servant who
used to tell me that if I were not good, by which she meant if I did
not behave with a single eye to her personal convenience, the cock would
come down the chimney. Less imaginative but equally dishonest people
told me I should go to hell if I did not make myself agreeable to them.
Bodily violence, provided it be the hasty expression of normal provoked
resentment and not vicious cruelty, cannot harm a child as this sort of
pious fraud harms it. There is a legal limit to physical cruelty; and
there are also human limits to it. There is an active Society which
brings to book a good many parents who starve and torture and overwork
their children, and intimidates a good many more. When parents of this
type are caught, they are treated as criminals; and not infrequently
the police have some trouble to save them from being lynched. The
people against whom children are wholly unprotected are those who devote
themselves to the very mischievous and cruel sort of abortion which is
called bringing up a child in the way it should go. Now nobody knows
the way a child should go. All the ways discovered so far lead to the
horrors of our existing civilizations, described quite justifiably by
Ruskin as heaps of agonizing human maggots, struggling with one another
for scraps of food. Pious fraud is an attempt to pervert that precious
and sacred thing the child's conscience into an instrument of our own
convenience, and to use that wonderful and terrible power called Shame
to grind our own axe. It is the sin of stealing fire from the altar: a
sin so impudently practised by popes, parents, and pedagogues, that one
can hardly expect the nurserymaids to see any harm in stealing a few
cinders when they are worrited.

Into the blackest depths of this violation of children's souls one can