if you make the slightest attempt to abort it into some fancy figure of
your own: for example, your notion of a good man or a womanly woman.
If you treat it as a little wild beast to be tamed, or as a pet to be
played with, or even as a means to save you trouble and to make money
for you (and these are our commonest ways), it may fight its way through
in spite of you and save its soul alive; for all its instincts will
resist you, and possibly be strengthened in the resistance; but if you
begin with its own holiest aspirations, and suborn them for your own
purposes, then there is hardly any limit to the mischief you may do.
Swear at a child, throw your boots at it, send it flying from the room
with a cuff or a kick; and the experience will be as instructive to the
child as a difficulty with a short-tempered dog or a bull. Francis Place
tells us that his father always struck his children when he found one
within his reach. The effect on the young Places seems to have been
simply to make them keep out of their father's way, which was no doubt
what he desired, as far as he desired anything at all. Francis records
the habit without bitterness, having reason to thank his stars that his
father respected the inside of his head whilst cuffing the outside of
it; and this made it easy for Francis to do yeoman's service to his
country as that rare and admirable thing, a Freethinker: the only
sort of thinker, I may remark, whose thoughts, and consequently whose
religious convictions, command any respect.

Now Mr Place, senior, would be described by many as a bad father; and
I do not contend that he was a conspicuously good one. But as compared
with the conventional good father who deliberately imposes himself on
his son as a god; who takes advantage of childish credulity and parent
worship to persuade his son that what he approves of is right and what
he disapproves of is wrong; who imposes a corresponding conduct on the
child by a system of prohibitions and penalties, rewards and eulogies,