On the Status of the Child.

To the Editor of Liberty

The sympathies extend the liberties. Notwithstanding that many people take such shortsighted means for the satisfaction of their feelings that they aggravate the distress they would relieve, still the most reasonable and well-thought-out plans for relief—those directed chiefly to negative oppression and accidents, leaving the individual as much as possible to his own resources to meet distress brought on himself by himself—find their justification in that they satisfy the sympathetic feelings. Without these latter stimuli, the best plans, no more than the worst, would bep ushed forward. No one with any degree of fellow-feeling would claim freedom (immunity from invasion) for himself without granting the same freedom to others. A man must be callous indeed who, on principle, refused to aid anyone against tyrants; and, if he forcibly prevented others from giving that aid which he would not give himself, he is an aggressor against mankind in general. We, as libertarians, claim for each person that he may use his judgment as to whom and to what extent he will help or refuse to help. We claim this as our plea for liberty,—that only aggressions are to be antagonized by force.

These elementary reflections, which (in part at least) you say I have no occasion to discuss with you, are nevertheless brought to the fore by your remarks in Liberty (Nos. 316 and 319); for it is a question whose doctrines regarding the status of children, yours and H.’s, or mine, are most consonant with the idea and requirement of liberty.

In your article you state: As long as children are unable to make contracts, I know of no reason why they should not be put on a par with property, especially if putting them on a par with property tends on the whole to lessen their suffering, and if there is no method of dealing with them that does not virtually put them on a par with property. In this sentence you state that you have in view the lessening of children’s suffering, but H., in Egoism, gave no signs of that extent of feeling. You, nevertheless, leave me in the dark as to how you consider a property-status for children can conduce to their welfare. And, in the absence of any qualifying phrases in your articles, I can only infer that the property-status contemplated by you is absolute, or as absolute as H. would have it, which is ninety-nine per cent. of absolutism. And you say you have joined H. bag and baggage.

Then I reply that, as the absolute property status of children means their total and unconditional enslavement to their parents or other owners, with the denial of their claims to any outside assistance against owners’ tyranny, and the forcible prevention of outsiders from giving assistance and succor, however much the child may be tortured, meaning also a stop put to the spread of sympathetic feeling and consequently to the extension of liberty, while men’s brutal feelings are allowed material upon which their brutality may be cultivated, the par with property status of children appears to be an invention of the devil. The czar of Russia, I believe, puts all his subjects on a par with property. This human property idea is, in fact, the idea with all potentates, and is really the one thing that our liberty propaganda was intended to abolish.

If, Mr. Editor, you had proclaimed that liberty was only for your own class, or only for adult males, or only for those between sixteen and sixty years of age, leaving the second childhood of man to be enslaved like the first, you would have paralleled your utterances drawing the line of liberty against those who have not passed their childhood as shown by their being unable to make contracts. As if their ability or non-ability to make contracts had anything more to do with their rightful enslavement or emancipation, or with the expediency of protecting them from ill-treatment, than their ability to smoke had.

Seeing that childhood and manhood (or womanhood) are but stages to the life history of the same animal,—which stages might, to please classifiers, be extended to a round dozen, according as the individual has or has not left off sucking, going to school, growing a beard, courting, earning money, marrying, or passing into his dotage (and, be it remembered, in States, most of these ages do affect the individual’s political status),—seeing that the immature and more or less dependent boy develops gradually into the mature and more or less independent man, any sharp line that society draws between the status of the child and that of the adult must be arbitrary in proportion to its sharpness.

The arbitrariness of the line may be of little import for expediting small matters, like the collection of taxes or votes, or even for fixing individual responsibility for debt; but, when the line of demarcation is used to determine between the two extremes of slavery and liberty, the entire status of the individual, the sacrifice of common sense and all the requirements of individual growth and development to a mere rule is flagrant.

Why it can be of any importance to divide the material with which the sociologist deals into two classes,—owners and owned, as you do, I have not the remotest idea. Anyway, the physical continuity of the human material under such a division, first as owned and then as owner, is a fact that protests against the arrangement, as it does also against any other that may cause an arrest of the orderly growth of the child to maturity.

I suppose we both agree that parents are the natural guardians of their offspring, at least while they treat the latter with a fair amount of guardianship. But guardian is not synonymous with owner, and, while guardianship is necessary for the child,—varying in quantity with the child’s development,—ownership is quite an intrusion, as it is in all slavery.

Parents are not producers of their children in the same sense that they may consider themselves the producers of their handiwork or brain-work. The evolution of all the complex tissues and endowments of the child goes on so independently of the parents’ will that H.’s having produced the child myself is grotesque in its impudence. Of course, if ownership rights are granted, as H. would grant them, these rights would be salable, and a class of child-slaves and slave-markets would follow as a matter of course. . . How nice for the children!

But the whole idea is obnoxious and unworkable, except at the cost of stunted feelings. No one can be expected to discriminate between an act of cruelty committed upon a child and a similar act committed upon one who is not a child, and to check his spontaneous help to the injured one if he finds it to be under age. Such a discrimination is too much against present development of human nature to bear a moment’s countenance. To discriminate in this matter against the child—the weakest—is only possible by the most callous or the most cowardly. It is dead against our instincts, and a system based upon this discrimination would depend upon a creed or a government for its workableness.

That parents with the best intentions act sometimes detrimentally to their child’s welfarei s met by the retort that so would any other guardians that might be appointed. All being fallible, and parents’ needs being generally met in satisfying their children’s needs, there is no necessity for establishing a special status for children.

Absolute ownership being ruled out as irrelevant, your question: Who shall own him (the child)—the parent or the community? does not catch hold of yours truly, at all. The intruder who interferes to prevent a man knocking either his wife or his brother or his child about does not assume ownership of the individual he protects from violence. The displacement of a cruel guardian by a lenient one is justified by the cruelty. And cruelty is the same whether inflicted on child or adult, and whether perpetrated by parent or by strangers.

You tell me that the articles by G., to which I referred, went counter to equal liberty, while that of H. affirmed equal liberty. As for these differences, they depend entirely upon your limit of all liberty to the equal liberty of adults. As I don’t take your position, those differences appear to me trivial beside the agreement in spirit of the writings of both G. and H. Both G. and H. claimed that parents had the right, under the equal liberty they favored, of treating their children as cruelly as they pleased, and outsiders mustn’t interfere to stop such conduct. Both being equally callous, both excite my antipathy. And even yourself, Mr. T., on March 18, 1893, wrote: If G.’s articles had appeared in any other journal than Egoism they would have made me boiling mad, for the sentiments which they proclaim are literally revolting; in fact, I have never seen anything more so. It was the sentiment displayed that caused you to pen that. And my only wonder is that the same revolting sentiments shown by H. are now overlooked by you. Whether G.’s or H.’s logic is the best is not the only point of importance to consider. There is a possibility of sacrificing one’s heart to what should do duty as the head.

You say you apply the equal liberty idea to every sphere of life, including the relations of parents to children, etc. And yet, in these relations, you are anxious to give all the liberty to the parents and none to the children! What equal liberty! What impartiality!

The creed is essential to the life, say you. Then how comes it about that you have no creed to protect the child’s life? Creed may be a help in transitional states of development; but inasmuch as our best actions—those that give pleasure to ourselves and to others and are performed spontaneously—are not forced in obedience to creed. I don’t see where creed comes in there. It is because I recognize that this is an imperfect world, and recognizing that between our august selves and babies, and savages, and criminals, and lunatics, there is a wide gap,—although the missing links are numerous enough,—I say that, although we cannot live on free contract terms with these inferiors, it shows a great want of the spirit of liberty and toleration in anyone who would deny the said inferiors a limited liberty. And, when the spirit goes, the form is likely to go also. Egoism’s position regarding children is a good case in point. As for Egoism’s being a journal that favors the very measures which I and you endorse, it is sufficiently obvious from this discussion that we take opposite measures in our treatment of children.

Yours sincerely,

John Badcock, Jr.

St. Brelade’s, Leyton, England. August 29, 1895.