CHAPTER X.
REBEL AND SUBJECT.
Children are early confronted with our laws, and it is worth while asking how they behave in relation to these. Many persons seem to think that children generally are disobedient, lawless creatures; others, that some are obedient, others disobedient. Perhaps neither of these views is quite exact enough.
(a) The Struggle with Law: First Tussle with Authority.
Let us begin our study by looking a little more closely at what we call the disobedient attitude of children. That it exists nobody, surely, can well doubt. The very liveliness of young limbs and young wits brings their possessors into conflict with our sedate customs. The person who tries to wield authority over these small people is constantly introducing unpleasant checkings of vigorous impulse. A child has large requirements in the matter of movements and experiments with things, which are apt to clash with what the mother considers orderliness; when he is out of doors he exhibits a duck-like fondness for dirty water, whereas civilisation, represented by his tidy nurse, wills it that man should, at least when not in the arctic regions, be clean; he shows a perverse passion for fun and tricks when the mother thinks it the right time for serious talk, and so forth. In these ways there comes the tussle with human law.
Yet surely, if we consider the matter impartially, we shall see that these collisions in the early years are perfectly normal and right. In the interests of the race, at any rate, we ought perhaps to regard him as the better child, as the child of finer promise, who will not subject himself to human law without a considerable show of resistance.
The first and most impressive form of resistance to the laws of grown-ups is the use of physical force, which has already been touched on. There is something pathetically comic in the spectacle of these mites resorting to the arbitrement of force, trying their small hand at pushing, striking, and the like; and as we have seen the effort is wont soon to exhaust itself in childish despair.
As soon as our authority begins to assert itself in the issuing of commands the child's disposition to disobey, that is to have his way rather than ours, is apt to show itself now and again in decided refusals. When, let us say, the nurse gives up pulling him from the dirty pool, and bids him come away, he may very likely assert himself in an eloquent, "I won't," or less bluntly, "I can't come yet".
Here, of course, there may be no wilful rejection of recognised law, but merely resistance to this particular disagreeable order coming from this particular person. Nevertheless we must, I fear, admit that such refusals to obey orders have in them something of true lawlessness. The whole attitude of the child when he thus "tries on" defiance of commands is certainly suggestive of the rebel's temper. Nobody is so completely reckless as the child-rebel. When the fit is on him he pays not the least attention to the most awful of warnings. One little offender of four when he was reminded by his sister—two years older—that he would be shut out from heaven retorted impiously, "I don't care"; adding, for reasons best known to himself, "uncle won't go—I'll stay with him".