‘Morbid —­ all morbid,’ remarked the listener.

’I don’t know.  It may only mean that one sees too clearly the root facts of existence.  I have another mood (less frequent) in which I try to persuade myself that I don’t care much about the child; that his future doesn’t really concern me at all.  Why should it?  He’s just one of the millions of human beings who come and go.  A hundred years hence —­ what of him and of me?  What can it matter how he lived and how he died?  The best kind of education would be that which hardened his skin and blunted his sympathies.  What right have I to make him sensitive?  The thing is, to get through life with as little suffering as possible.  What monstrous folly to teach him to wince and cry out at the sufferings of other people!  Won’t he have enough of his own before he has done?  Yet that’s what we shall aim at —­ to cultivate his sympathetic emotions, so that the death of a bird shall make him sad, and the sight of human distress wring his heart.  Real kindness would try to make of him a healthy ruffian, with just enough conscience to keep him from crime.’

‘Theory for theory, I prefer this,’ said Morton.  ’To a certain extent I try to act upon it.’

‘You do?’

’Just because I know that my own tendency is to over-softness.  I have sometimes surprised my wife by bidding Harry disregard things that appealed to his pity.  You remember what old Hobbes says:  “Homo malus, puer robustus”?  There was more truth in it in his day than in ours.  It’s natural for a boy to be a good deal of a savage, but our civilisation is doing its best to change that.  Why, not long ago the lad asked me whether fishing wasn’t cruel.  He evidently felt that it was, and so do I; but I couldn’t say so.  I laughed it off, and told him that a fish diet was excellent for the brains!’

‘I hope I may have as much courage,’ said Harvey.

’Life is a compromise, my dear fellow.  If the world at large would suddenly come round to a cultivation of the amiable virtues —­ well and good.  But there’s no hope of it.  As it is, our little crabs must grow their hard shell, or they’ve no chance.’

’What about progress?  In educating children, we are making the new world.’

Morton assented.

’But there’s no hurry.  The growth must be gradual —­ will be, whether we intend it or not.  The fact is, I try not to think overmuch about my children.  It remains a doubt, you know, whether education has any influence worth speaking of.’

‘To me,’ said Harvey, ’the doubt seems absurd.  In my own case, I know, a good system of training would have made an enormous difference.  Practically, I was left to train myself, and a nice job I made of it.  Do you remember how I used to talk about children before I had one?  I have thought it was the talk of a fool; but, perhaps, after all, it had more sanity than my views nowadays.’

‘Medio tutissimus,’ murmured Basil.