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PARTISAN REVIEW
make it sound better. The Russian boy, neat in his habits, produced
a pencil and a small notebook and made a calculation.
"My father has over two hundred times as much money as
yours," he announced with a sort of amused contempt.
That was in 1915. What happened to that money a couple of
)'ears later, I wonder? And still more I wonder, do conversations of
that kind happen at preparatory schools now?
Clearly there has been a vast change of outlook, a general
growth of "enlightenment," even among ordinary, unthinking mid–
dle-class people. Religious belief, for instance, has largely vanished,
dragging other kinds of nonsense after it. I imagine that very few
people nowadays would tell a child that if it masturbates it will end
in the lunatic asylum. Beating, too, has become discredited, and
has even been abandoned at many schools. Nor is the underfeeding
of children looked on as a normal, almost meritorious act. Noone
now would openly set out to give his pupils as little
fO'Jd
as they
could do with, or tell them that it is healthy to get up from a meal as
hungry as you sat down. The whole status of children has im–
proved, partly because they have grown relatively less numerous.
And the diffusion of even a little psychological knowledge has made
it harder for parents and school-teachers to indulge their aberrations
in the name of discipline. Here is a case, not known to me person–
ally, but known to someone I can vouch for, and happening within
my own lifetime. A small girl, daughter of a clergyman, continued
wetting her bed at an age when she should have grown out of it.
In
order to punish her for this dreadful deed, her father took her to
a large garden party and there introduced her to the whole company
as a little girl who wet her bed: and to underline her wickedness
he had previously painted her face black. I do not suggest that Bingo
and Sim would actually have done a thing like this, but I doubt
whether it would have much surprised them. After all, things do
change. And yet-!
The question is not whether boys are still buckled into Eton
collars on Sunday, or told that babies are dug up under gooseberry
bushes. That kind of thing is at an end, admittedly. The real ques–
tion is whether it is still normal for a school child to live for years
amid irrational terrors and lunatic misunderstandings. And here one
is up against the very great difficulty of knowing what a child really
