All the toys being collected, Frankie picked up the box and placed it noisily in its accustomed corner of the room.
“I should think the workers will be jolly glad when they see me coming to tell them what to do, shouldn’t you, Mum?”
“I don’t know dear; you see so many people have tried to tell them, but they won’t listen, they don’t want to hear. They think it’s quite right that they should work very hard all their lives, and quite right that most of the things they help to make should be taken away from them by the people who do nothing. The workers think that their children are not as good as the children of the idlers, and they teach their children that as soon as ever they are old enough they must be satisfied to work very hard and to have only very bad food and clothes and homes.”
“Then I should think the workers ought to be jolly ashamed of themselves, Mum, don’t you?”
“Well, in one sense they ought, but you must remember that that’s what they’ve always been taught themselves. First, their mothers and fathers told them so; then, their schoolteachers told them so; and then, when they went to church, the vicar and the Sunday School teacher told them the same thing. So you can’t be surprised that they now really believe that God made them and their children to make things for the use of the people who do nothing.”
“But you’d think their own sense would tell them! How can it be right for the people who do nothing to have the very best and most of everything that’s made, and the very ones who make everything to have hardly any. Why even I know better than that, and I’m only six and a half years old.”
“But then you’re different, dearie, you’ve been taught to think about it, and Dad and I have explained it to you, often.”
“Yes, I know,” replied Frankie confidently. “But even if you’d never taught me, I’m sure I should have tumbled to it all right by myself; I’m not such a juggins as you think I am.”
“So you might, but you wouldn’t if you’d been brought up in the same way as most of the workers. They’ve been taught that it’s very wicked to use their own judgement, or to think. And their children are being taught so now. Do you remember what you told me the other day, when you came home from school, about the Scripture lesson?”
“About St Thomas?”