THE MYSTIFICATION OF THE' INNOCENTS

New Zealand Tablet, 6 November 1919, Page 9

THE MYSTIFICATION OF THE' INNOCENTS

• , ' \ * . ■ i' (By G. K. Chesterton, ; in the New Witness.) The Wise Men who followed the star of the first Christmas wete described as Magi, v men learned in labyrinthine sciences of stars arid ? systems,, S They did not, however, alien they found the Holy Family in the stable, take the Child away forcibly.; to learn astronomy in the schools, localise there was nothing but carpentering to be learnt ll 1 1 . the . nome. The Wise Men were wiser than that, for all their sciences. But this is the process we are required da recognise to-day as the most beneficent of all social reforms; the forcible education of the children of one class at the command of the adults of the other; most of the latter being by no means wise men, and even very far from being learned men. It may not unreasonably be answered that it is the other part of the analogy that fails: and that an argument from the Holy Family cannot always be applied even to the protection of the human family. But in this case I am not so sure. Suppose we were thinking only of the human families suffering the visitation of Herod; and suppose’ that official'visit did not end in killing but only in kidnapping—in carrying away the babies b\ brute force and putting them in scholastic • compounds to learn Egyptian hieroglyphics or Babylonia cuneiform or something that their parents had never heard of, and to learn along with these ' valuable things a complete spiritual separation from their parents. Suppose that Rachel, instead of weeping for her children because they were not, were only weeping because they were not her children or v ei e not treated as her children. . Even then, I suggest, wo should at this distance of time sympathise with the eternal human group and. not the contemporary, and very temporary, type of culture. We should, looking back across the centuries, prefer babies to Babylon and happy families to hieroglyphics and the cause of this instinctive movement in our minds is worth consideration. It may be stated shortly by saying that we are outside such ancient schools, but we are still inside the ancient home. We can criticise some system of Rabbinical or Alexandrian teaching to which Herod might subject the children we can see its bias and limitations; we can imagine how naturally it would bo made on the pattern of court rhetoricians and court jurists praising the tyrant arid his times. What we will not see is that the current modern education, which wo are forcing on the poor, is just as much open to criticism, just as much marked by limitation, just as full of fla'ttery and servility, while it is really far less subtle and civilised than anything elaborated by the Rabbis or the Greeks. Not a few centuries hence, but a few decades hence, its light against the family will look as futile and as base. -X* I should naturally be inspired to sympathy with the ideal of turning all the rising generation into good citizens, if I could believe that what) wo call education really was turning them into good citizens, or into any kind of citizens. I seriously believe that there was something much nearer the truth in the statement made to me by a well-known Irish man of letters; “Education is turning the children into thieves.” Whether the criminal statistics support this suggestion I do not know and do not care. There is almost always a fallacy, gaping like a great hole, in the controversial use of statistics; and the fallacy is singularly simple in the case of criminal statistics. It is the very obvious fact that official records can only be records of punished crime. They cannot give us any assurance whatever about unpunished crime. In other words, they are strictly limited to telling us how far crime fails; they are utterly helpless before the vast and inspiring vista, of how crime succeeds. When the Old Man of the Mountain sent out his assassins in a wild land in a wild epoch, the official survey of social conditions on the mountain and its environs probably recorded a most satisfactory absence of crime. Where there is an Established Church of Thuggee, the deaths dealt out by the Thugs do not go down in the list of crimes, but in the list of services and missions for the. propagation of the Gospel.. It is doubtful even whether the statistics of infant mortality under King Herod were published in full; or whether the case of Cain v. Abel ever got into the police news. Similarly, in modern times the law reports of thefts and , swindling always omit, for some inexplicable reason, the cases of .? the % modern millionaires and their well-known methods' of getting money. Those, of course,' are cases of crimes being too largo to bo punished; ‘but in the question considered here,’ it is often a case of crimes being too small ' to be s punished. With the eyes that God has given me, arid which I am so superstitious 'as to believe more implicitly than statistics, I have seen in my own neighborhood an abnormal -increase, of the sort of small juvenile crimes which used to., be punished by the family but really cannot . isee*.

be' punished -by - the - law. -They are r not'recorded- because they are 1 not prosecuted; : and * they are not prosecuted' because no humorous and humane % person , wants to start a child on the infernal ’treadmill of‘ the modern' prison. They are quite obviously things to ,be dealt with by domestic authority. They are not dealt with by domestic authority, because domestic authority is not there to deal with them. And it is not there to deal with them because we have destroyed it. *

To say education has destroyed it may seem elliptical, but it is really pretty exact. Most of the teachers work devotedly for the welfare of the children, and a few admit the: objective existence of the parents. But it is . not a question of what the teachers consciously do, but of what they unconsciously are. They are generally of a class and type different from the true populace and one rigid with certain small refinements that divide them from the popu-„ lace, and especially the pleasures of the populace. If children see that their teachers despise what their parents desire, there is and must be a conflict of authorities. And there is, and must be, in the modern State, a monstrous discovery that it is the more new and unnatural authority that has the power. It is soon obvious that the same type of authority that can order the children about in a schoolroom can order the parents about in a police court. A child soon discovers that there is somebody who can talk to his mother as if she were a child. The child observes that this person commands a higher power of culture, leisure, and influence in other words, the child, in the course of failing to become a scholar, may perhaps succeed in becoming a snob and a sneak. But as a fact, by a somewhat brighter and breezier tendency, he quite as often simply succeeds in becoming a thief and a robber. He knows pretty well that the policeman cannot really look after everybody; and he has lost all respect for that natural policeman whom Providence has put on the earth especially to look after him. And everybody seems to have forgotten entirely that the natural policeman is just as likely to be a good man as the artificial policeman; just as likely to be good in general, and much more likely to be good to the child. The two arc probably poor, plain, coarse men of much the same sort, with very little difference except that one may have a toy in his pocket and not only a truncheon. But the point for the moment is that the natural dignity of the one has been destroyed, and only the artificial terror of the other left standing; and upon that terror, and -that terror alone, all that we call popular education now depends. The issue is decided solely by the fact that the schoolmaster has the policeman behind him, and the father has the policeman against him. Compulsory education does not even compel; legal instruction does not even instruct people to respect legality. But I am much more sorry for those who absorb it than for those who reject it; the schools of the plutocratic State inculcate the plutocratic morality exactly as the school of the Prussian State inculcated the Prussian morality. To-day it demands not only the childhood, but the. youth of the nation. It is the most coercive of all types of conscription. And it is a strange sign of the spiritual bewilderment of our time that there should be such a clamor about the conscription of bodies and such a silence about the conscription of souls.