Part 16 (2/2)

Think of the enerally address their wives as ”Mother” I know happily married men who are psychically children; ”mother” won't allow them to carry coals or wash dishes or brush clothes; she treats them as they unconsciously desire to be treated--as babes

Itmother complex He often talks of his mother, and more than once I have heard him say that she was the best woman he had ever known It gie and the other girls, and failed to find her Maggie's reh to stifle his love declaration The soul he longed to find in Maggie may have been the soul of the mother he knew as an infant

the soul of his ideal woman

The more I see of men the less importance I pay to their conscious reasons for attitudes ”I hate Brown; he never washes”; ”I dislike Mrs Se” ”Murphy is a rotter; he has no manners” Statements like these are rationalisations; the real reason for the dislike lies deeper in every case

VI

The law courts have re-introduced flogging for crie no member of the law profession has protested If there is a reform movement within the law I never heard of it

The curse of law is that it works according to precedent, and it is therefore conservative Our judges hand out sentences in blissful ignorance of later psychology Last week a boy of eleven was birched for holding up another boy of nine on the highway and de tuppence or his life The attitude of the bench is that fear of another flogging will prevent that boy froain

I admit that fear will cure him of that special vice, but what the bench does not know is that the boy's anti-social energy will take another form Every act of man is prompted by a wish, and very often this wish is unconscious And all the birching in the world will not destroy a wish; the e its form

Without an analysis of the boy no one can tell what unconscious wish ienerally a boy expresses his self-assertion in terms of anti-social behaviour only when his education has been bad I believe that all juvenile delinquency is due to bad education Our schools enforce passivity on the child; his creative energy is bottled up No boy who has tools and a bench to ill express hi s Delinquency is merely displaced social conduct; the hwayman was essentially the motive of the boy who builds a boat

Ah! but we have Industrial Schools for bad boys!

I spent an evening with an Industrial School boy of thirteen not long ago It was an unlovely tale he toldhalf-prison, half-barracks No one was allowed to go out unless to footballPunishuy, 'e sends you to the boss for punishave 'im an insubordinate look, and you ain't allowed to deny wot 'e says”

”Look here, Jim,” I said, ”suppose I took you to a free school to-morrow, a school where you could do what you liked, what's the first thing you would do?”

A wild look came into his eyes

”I'd lay out the blarsted staff,” he said tensely

”But,” I laughed, ”ould be the point of laying ainst _ot freedom in the Industrial School!”

That school is condemned; if a school produces one boy who hates and fears its teachers, it is a bad school

I think of the other way, the Homer Lane way

Homer Lane was superintendent of the little Coed the istrates to hand over to him the worst cases they had He took the children down to Dorset and gave them freedoinning of the Commonwealth was chaos Lane joined in the anti-social behaviour; he becaht that their best way of expressing themselves was to smash s, Lane helped theht will best be illustrated by the story of Jabez

Jabez was a thoroughly bad character; he had been thief and highwayht with science He cairls working hard all day, and ht Jabez could not understand it, and not understanding he felt hostile

The citizens lived in cottages, and one night Lane went over to the cottage in which Jabez lived They were having tea, and Lane sat down beside Jabez

”What are you always grousing about, Jabez?” he asked ”Don't you like the Commonwealth?”