Let us see how we treat, in our nurseries, this foundation of ethics, this sentiment of individual rights. We enter a middle-class nursery where a baby and his sister Jessie, a child of three years of age, are side by side on the floor. An impulse seizes baby to clutch the doll, which Jessie holds firmly. Baby screams and nurse turns round and lifts him in her arms. “See, Jessie,” she says, “he wants your doll, surely you will be kind to baby brother?” She takes the doll from Jessie and gives it to the infant. Jessie throws herself on the ground and kicks and screams. A paroxysm of emotion sweeps over her, and until the wave has spent itself tranquillity in nerve or muscle is simply impossible. But the nurse, ignorant of the fact that the child is for the moment bereft of any power of self-control, commands her to be still, and when not obeyed, she scolds her severely. Finally she puts her in a corner, and there poor Jessie sobs and weeps till pure exhaustion brings her to passivity and an abject state of mind which nurse calls “being good again.” She signifies her approval of it by a kiss of forgiveness as unmerited as the previous anger.
Now here we have an emotion supremely important to the welfare of humanity rudely desecrated in infancy. There was nothing base, sordid, exclusive or even selfish in the tempest of feeling that swept away the placidity of Jessie’s little soul. Mingled together there was an impulse to defend her personal rights and a hot indignation that any infringement of these rights should occur. And the whole was a wave of the complex forces destined to weld society into an organic whole, capable of maintaining free institutions. When the nurse through ignorance punished the child for the involuntary expression of a virtuous social-emotion, she was opposing the very order of nature that genetic evolution is striving to attain; she was checking the progress of modern civilization.
Later in the day Jessie with her doll restored to her arms is happy again. Baby plays with his rattle on nurse’s knee; but Jessie thinks, “My dolly is a baby too and wants a rattle.” She takes the rattle out of baby’s hands to give to dolly. Baby shouts and kicks, and nurse is furious. She slaps Jessie and calls her a “naughty child.” There is no ebullition of anger this time, although the tender little fingers ache from the rude blow. Jessie shrinks aside with a subdued air. Had her former rebellion been an impulse of pure vindictiveness it would have repeated itself now. It had no such feature. It revealed the fact that Jessie was the offspring of a self-dependent, self-protective race preparing for a new stage of social evolution, and her aspect at the present crisis reveals the same. She did not know she was in the wrong; but vaguely she felt it. She had trespassed on baby’s rights, and conscience dumbly stirred in her infant bosom. If intelligence is strong the child questions silently, “Why may baby take my doll when I may not take his rattle?” The nurse will give no answer. Her province is to feed and cleanse and clothe her charges, and, if need be, punish action. But the motive springs of action lie quite beyond her range, and what is the consequence? If Jessie’s intellect predominates over her emotional quality, her conscience may develop, although under adverse conditions; but if the balance tends the other way the position is fatal. The child gathers her ideas of right and wrong from the frowns and smiles, the slaps or kisses of an ignorant woman who is ruling the nursery with an authority purely barbaric, and the budding conscience of a modern civilization adapts itself to the archaic environment and reverts or lapses backward.
Further, observe, the nurse strove to create—in this case, at least—sympathy towards a baby brother. Was this wise? It was not wise, although well-intentioned. Sympathy never develops under command, and to order a child to be kind at the moment when an aggression has been made on his or her rights is like commanding a steam-engine to move forward without turning on the steam! Moreover, baby, young as he was, suffered mentally and morally by the event. He learned an evil lesson, viz., that if he cried he would probably get what he wanted. Vigorously, though unconsciously, he will pursue that vicious course and act up to the principle.
Does my reader inquire “What should the nurse have done?” She should have instantly removed the baby, saying gently to Jessie, “Children must never take things from one another. Not even a baby can be permitted to do that, and we must teach him better. But see he is so young, he does not know the doll is yours, not his. Would you like to lend it to him for a little? No? Ah, well he cannot have it then, but come and help me to amuse him that he may forget the doll.” The older child puts down her treasure to fondle her baby brother, and there are ten chances to one that by-and-bye her sympathy—called out naturally and not by command—carries her a step further, and she says: “Nurse, baby may hold my doll for a little now.” Later, when the brilliant idea occurs that dolly would enjoy the rattle, Jessie understands—she does not blindly, vaguely feel, she knows—that she must not trespass on baby’s rights. She restrains her impulse therefore to snatch the rattle, and in this self-control she is exercising the noblest faculty of her nature under the dominion of a moral conscience—a sense of justice or equivalence of rights.
And now we pass from an upper middle-class nursery to any British boys’ school or playground. We find that quarrels there arise not so much from the simple barbarous impulses of cruelty, hatred, revenge, fear, as from a different source—an effective sense of personal rights unbalanced by an equally effective sense of sympathy with the rights of others. The phenomenon here is justice in embryo, self-conscious, but lacking development on the altruistic side. “It isn’t” or “it wasn’t fair” is a phrase frequently upon a schoolboy’s lips, and it is remarkable with what courage and dignity an urchin of ten or twelve will criticize a master’s treatment of him, and perhaps tell the man of fifty to his face that this or that “wasn’t fair.”
Were every boy as eager that all human beings—schoolmasters included—should be as fairly treated as he himself, the only further regulation of conduct necessary would be a clear intelligence to discern truth from falsehood in every case of misdemeanour. Instructed intelligence is however a minus quantity, and the sympathetic jealousy for the rights of others that exists here and there amongst boys in minor quantity, gets deflected from its true course. It links boys of one age together in a mutual fellowship that excludes masters and all others. Nor is this difficult to understand. Mutual interests is the soil in which sympathy grows; but with arbitrary authority in the field, also conflicting desires, and no distinct teaching on the subject, the deeper relations of life, I mean the mutual interests of teacher and taught and of the whole school as a social unity, are often ignored. To shield a companion from punishment, at all hazards, becomes virtue in a schoolboy’s eyes, and antagonisms spring up with confused notions of right and wrong, and a general impulse to falsehood and deceit in special directions. These are menacing features of character for the social life of the future. Men of introspection have recognized in themselves the baneful after-effects of the clannishness engendered at school. Robert Louis Stevenson bewailed the extreme difficulty he had in forcing himself to perform a distinct public duty. It involved some exposure dishonourable to a former schoolmate! “I felt,” he said, “like a cad!”
From middle-class nurseries where authority is chiefly barbaric and the budding conscience is hurt, children destined to become the élite of a future society and its rulers, pass into schools where there is no clear and definite training for the emotional nature, no scientific development of the social, and repression of the anti-social impulses. From school the student passes to college or university, and is emancipated more or less from outward control. When he enters upon the duties and pleasures of adult life he presents, in many ways, an element of social danger, for this simple reason, his native bumptiousness, his sense of individual rights is not held in check by an intelligent understanding of, and feeling of sympathy with, the equal rights of others. The groundwork of the modern conscience has been tampered with while authority—propelled by genetic forces of evolution—has gradually relaxed and fallen back before the free-born British schoolboy. By our present system of education we destroy infant virtue in the nursery and in the school. We dwarf that sympathy which should grow and expand till it bursts forth in manhood into deeds of rectitude, justice, love, manifesting the threefold quality of human nature which alone is competent to lift the whole area of man’s existence into line with cosmic order. Our schools are yearly pouring into the busy world a rich harvest of human aptitudes that are quickly absorbed in activities mercantile, professional, legislative, but the outcome of these activities is not tuning life into social harmony, it is merely increasing national wealth, and that without any marked increase of plenty and pleasure to the nation at large. The picture presented is one of perpetual warfare—an outward struggle in money-making for oneself and family, an inward contentious spirit that reveals itself abroad in our blatant imperialism, at home in class antagonisms—the whole re-acting fatally on individual character and lowering the general standard of civilized life. Generous enthusiasms die down, the emotional nature hardens, till intelligence itself is dimmed and becomes incapable of any wide outlook that entails unselfish effort.
As a rule—though with honourable exceptions—our compatriots advanced in life do not fulfil the promise of their youth; and with forces of nature amenable to man’s will, if wisely directed, real progress in this scientific age is wofully sluggish. We focus attention on environments that press on adults only, and in seeking reform overlook the environments that vitally effect our infant population, therefore the adult life of the future.
How different is our action in other directions. In horticultural nurseries, for instance, progress is not sluggish. Scientific discovery and methods of practice are applied and promptly produce definite results. The composite plants are distinguished from simple plants, and while all are secured in necessary conditions of healthy life—good soil, air, light, etc.—those receive from the gardener a special fostering care. He studies the laws of differentiation, the peculiarities of each organism with its hidden possibilities of varied efflorescence, and by fitting environment to wider issues, watching them day by day, nourishing every tendency favourable, checking every tendency unfavourable, he induces an outburst of blossom as varied in colour and form as it is marvellous in beauty or grace, and that in spite of the fact that unaided by natural forces he is utterly powerless to make a blade of grass grow.