that every child wore a badge indicating its class in society, and that
every child seen speaking to another child with a lower-class badge, or
any child wearing a higher badge than that allotted to it by, say, the
College of Heralds, should immediately be skinned alive with a birch
rod. It might even be insisted that girls with high-class badges should
be attended by footmen, grooms, or even military escorts. In short,
there is hardly any limit to the follies with which our Commercialism
would infect any system that it would tolerate at all. But something
like a change of heart is still possible; and since all the evils of
snobbery and segregation are rampant in our schools at present we may as
well make the best as the worst of them.




Children's Rights and Duties

Now let us ask what are a child's rights, and what are the rights of
society over the child. Its rights, being clearly those of any other
human being, are summed up in the right to live: that is, to have all
the conclusive arguments that prove that it would be better dead, that
it is a child of wrath, that the population is already excessive, that
the pains of life are greater than its pleasures, that its sacrifice in
a hospital or laboratory experiment might save millions of lives,
etc. etc. etc., put out of the question, and its existence accepted
as necessary and sacred, all theories to the contrary notwithstanding,
whether by Calvin or Schopenhauer or Pasteur or the nearest person with
a taste for infanticide. And this right to live includes, and in fact
is, the right to be what the child likes and can, to do what it likes
and can, to make what it likes and can, to think what it likes and