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 for his own credit let
his son go in rags. Also, in a very large section of the population,
parents finally become dependent on their children. Thus there are
checks on child slavery which do not exist, or are less powerful, in the
case of manual and industrial slavery. Sensationally bad cases fall into
two classes, which are really the same class: namely, the children
whose parents are excessively addicted to the sensual luxury of petting
children, and the children whose parents are excessively addicted to the
sensual luxury of physically torturing them. There is a Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children which has effectually made an end of
our belief that mothers are any more to be trusted than stepmothers, or
fathers than slave-drivers. And there is a growing body of law designed
to prevent parents from using their children ruthlessly to make money
for the household. Such legislation has always been furiously resisted
by the parents, even when the horrors of factory slavery were at
their worst; and the extension of such legislation at present would be
impossible if it were not that the parents affected by it cannot control
a majority of votes in Parliament. In domestic life a great deal of