service is done by children, the girls acting as nursemaids and general
servants, and the lads as errand boys. In the country both boys and
girls do a substantial share of farm labor. This is why it is necessary
to coerce poor parents to send their children to school, though in the
relatively small class which keeps plenty of servants it is impossible
to induce parents to keep their children at home instead of paying
schoolmasters to take them off their hands.

It appears then that the bond of affection between parents and children
does not save children from the slavery that denial of rights involves
in adult political relations. It sometimes intensifies it, sometimes
mitigates it; but on the whole children and parents confront one another
as two classes in which all the political power is on one side; and
the results are not at all unlike what they would be if there were no
immediate consanguinity between them, and one were white and the other
black, or one enfranchised and the other disenfranchised, or one ranked
as gentle and the other simple. Not that Nature counts for nothing in
the case and political rights for everything. But a denial of political
rights, and the resultant delivery of one class into the mastery of
another, affects their relations so extensively and profoundly that it
is impossible to ascertain what the real natural relations of the two
classes are until this political relation is abolished.




What is a Child?

An experiment. A fresh attempt to produce the just man made perfect:
that is, to make humanity divine. And you will vitiate the experiment