Childhood ought to be the happiest period of humanity’s course; for children are free from the two great sources of grief and wretchedness—the struggle for money and the consciousness of sex. The children of the poor know a want of many comforts, but this is not a source of unhappiness. Absolute necessities of life, the only true wants of childhood, are so few, and all that is really needed by anybody apart from custom or imagination is so cheap, that I do not think that more than a small minority of children are unhappy from actual want. But we, their elders, painfully and acutely want a thousand things because we have tasted them, or because we have imaginations developed to fancy effectively how we should enjoy them; and then we must needs try to get them, and make ourselves wretched in the furious effort after satisfying our desires, and more wretched still because we don’t fully succeed. If we could take life as children in this respect, actively wanting only absolute necessaries, and not having to ourselves strive for even the money by which that minimum of wants is to be supplied, would not most of our troubles of this actual moment vanish? Those that remained, would they not nearly all (given health) hang on the tragic fact of sex? Oh, that garden of Gethsemane of humanity, with its blighted seedlings and its blasted blossoms! How keen are its sorrows of desires ungratified and desires satiated—its cruel losses and its yet more cruel relics that will remain. Oh, that dreadful fact of sex, with its emotional agonies, its moral problems, its intellectual interruptions, its social burdens, and only too often its physical pangs—if we were rid, as children are, of all that, and of the struggle for means to meet the daily material wants, should we not be fairly happy? Then childhood, free of all this, must needs be the happiest time of life!