of supplication and prayer; with cherry
lip—"some bee has stung it newly"—lisping
thanksgiving and love; with arms that
long to embrace; with eyes beaming
confidence, joy, pity, tenderness:—am I to be
told that this infant is father to yon hulking,
sodden, sallow-faced, blue-gilled, crop-haired,
leaden-eyed, livid-lipped, bow-shouldered,
shrunken-legged, swollen-handed convict in a
hideous grey uniform branded with the broad
arrow; with ribbed worsted hose and fetters
at his ankles, sullenly skulking through his
drudgery under the rattan of an overseer and
the bayonet of a marine in Woolwich dockyard?
Is the child whom I love and in whom I
hope, father to yon wretch with a neck already
half-dislocated with fear, with lips half-dead,
with heart wholly so, who droops on his
miserable pallet in Newgate cell, his chin on
his breast, his hands between his knees, his
legs shambling; the stony walls around him;
the taciturn gaolers watching him; a bible by
his side, in whose pages, when he tries to read,
the letters slide and fall away from under
his eye? Is this the father to—can this ever
become that?

Not only in your world-verbiage must the
child be father to the man, but the man is
merely a child of a larger growth. I deny it.
Some boys are tyrants, bullies, hypocrites,
and liars for fear of punishment; thieves, alas,
through ill-example oftimes. Some girls are
tell-tales, jealous, spiteful, slanderous, vain and
giddy, I grant. If you were to tell me that
bad boys and girls often grow up to be bad
men and women, I should agree with you.
The evil example of you bad men and women
begins to corrupt boys and girls early enough.
Heaven knows; but do not brand the child
—you know when infancy begins and
childhood terminates—with being but your own
wickedness seen through the small end of the
glass. The man a child of larger growth?
Did you ever know a man of smaller growth
—a child—to discount bills at forty per cent.,
and offer you for the balance half cash,
and the rest poison (put down in the bill
as "wine") and opera stalls? Did you
ever know a child to pawn his sister's
playthings, or rob his playmate of his pocket
money to gamble, and to cheat while gambling,
and to go hang or drown himself when he had
lost his winnings and his stolen capital?
Could you ever discern a hankering in a
child to accumulate dollars by trading in the
flesh and blood of his fellow-creatures? Did
you ever know a child to hoard halfpence in
a rag or a teapot, to store rinds of mouldy
cheese in secret, or to grow rich in rotten
apple parings? Did you ever hear a child
express an opinion that his friend Tommy
must eternally be burnt, for not holding
exactly the same religious opinions as he,
Billy, did? Are children false swearers for
hire, liars for gain, parasites for profit? Do
they begin to throw mud with their earliest
pothooks and hangers; do they libel their
nurse and vilify the doctor? Men have their
playthings, it is true, and somewhat resemble
overgrown children in their puerile eagerness
for a blue ribbon, an embroidered garter, a
silver cross dangling to a morsel of red silk,
or a gilt walking stick. But will the child
crawl in the gutter for the blue ribbon, or
walk barefoot over broken bottles for the
garter, or wallow in the mire for the gilt
walking stick? I think not. Give him a
string of red beads, a penny trumpet, or a
stick of barley sugar, and he will let the
ribbons and garters go hang. Try to
persuade, with your larger growth theory, one
of your smaller men to walk backwards
down a staircase before the King of Lilliput.
Persuade Colonel Fitz Tommy, aged four, to
stand for five hours on one leg behind the
King of Lilliput's chair in his box at the
Marionette Theatre. Try to induce little
Lady Totsey, aged three, to accede to the
proposal of being maid of honour to her doll.
Tommy and Totsey leave such tomfooleries
to be monopolised by the larger children.

We have another school of axiomatic
philosophers; who, abandoning the theorem
that manhood is but the enlarged identity of
infancy, maintain that the child is an
intellectual negation—nothing at all physically or
mentally. The enlightened M. Fourier has
denied children the possession of sex, calling
them Neuters; and numbers of philosophers,
with their attendant schools of disciples, have
pleased themselves by comparing the child's
mind to a blank sheet of paper; innocent, but
capable of receiving moral caligraphy good
or bad. The mind of a child like a blank
sheet of Bath post? The sheet is fair,
hot-pressed, undefiled by blot or erasure if you
will, but it is not blank. In legible, ineffaceable
characters thereupon, you may read Faith
and strong belief. The child believes without
mental reservation; he does not require to be
convinced; and if even, now and then, some
little struggling dawn of argumentative
scepticism leads him to doubt faintly, and to ask
how bogey can always manage to live in the
cellar among the coals; how the black dog
can be on his shoulder, when he sees no
dog there; why little boys should not ask
questions, and why the doctor should have
brought baby with him under his cloak—he
is easily silenced by the reply that good
children always believe what is told them;
and that he must believe; so he does believe.
His faith was but shaken for a moment.
Belief was written too strongly in his little
heart to be eradicated by his little logic.
Would that when he comes to be a child
of larger growth, forsooth, no subtle powers
of reasoning should prompt him to dissect
and anatomise his body of belief, till nothing
but dry bones remain, and it fall into a pit
of indifference and scepticism!

That child has a maimed child-mind who
does not believe implicitly in all the fairy
tales—in the existence of ogres, fairies, giants,