The world wags in spite of its schools and its families because both
schools and families are mostly very largely anarchic: parents and
schoolmasters are good-natured or weak or lazy; and children are docile
and affectionate and very shortwinded in their fits of naughtiness; and
so most families slummock along and muddle through until the children
cease to be children. In the few cases when the parties are energetic
and determined, the child is crushed or the parent is reduced to a
cipher, as the case may be. When the opposed forces are neither of them
strong enough to annihilate the other, there is serious trouble: that
is how we get those feuds between parent and child which recur to our
memory so ironically when we hear people sentimentalizing about natural
affection. We even get tragedies; for there is nothing so tragic to
contemplate or so devastating to suffer as the oppression of will
without conscience; and the whole tendency of our family and school
system is to set the will of the parent and the school despot above
conscience as something that must be deferred to abjectly and absolutely
for its own sake.

The strongest, fiercest force in nature is human will. It is the highest
organization we know of the will that has created the whole universe.
Now all honest civilization, religion, law, and convention is an attempt
to keep this force within beneficent bounds. What corrupts civilization,
religion, law, and convention (and they are at present pretty nearly
as corrupt as they dare) is the constant attempts made by the wills of
individuals and classes to thwart the wills and enslave the powers
of other individuals and classes. The powers of the parent and the
schoolmaster, and of their public analogues the lawgiver and the
judge, become instruments of tyranny in the hands of those who are too
narrow-minded to understand law and exercise judgment; and in their