What more can there be to tell?

 

He is no longer mine. I have handed him over to society. Hr. Petersen, candidate in letters, Hr. Nielsen, student of theology, and Fröken Hansen, certificated teacher, will now set their distinguished¹ example before him for five hours daily. He will form himself in their likeness². Their spirit hovers³ over him at school: he brings it home with him, it overshadows him when he is learning the lessons which they zealously⁴ mete⁵ out to him.

 

I don't know these people. But I pay them.

 

I, who have had a hard fight to keep my thoughts free and my limbs unrestrained and who have not retired⁶ from the fight without deep wounds of which I am reminded when the weather changes, I have, of my own free will, brought him to the institution for maiming human beings. I, who at times have soared to peaks that were my own, because the other birds dared not follow me, have myself brought him to the place where wings are clipped for flying respectably, with the flock.

 

"There was nothing else to be done," says the mother of my little boy.

 

"Really?" I reply, bitterly. "Was there nothing else to be done? But suppose that I had put by some money, so that I could have saved Messrs. Petersen and Nielsen and Fröken Hansen their trouble and employed my day in myself opening out lands for that little traveller whom I myself have brought into the land? Suppose that I had looked round the world for people with small boys who think as I do and that we had taken upon us to bring up these young animals so that they kept sight of horns and tails and fairy-tales?"

 

"Yes," she says.

 

"Small boys have a bad time of it, you know."

 

"They had a worse time of it in the old days."

 

"That is a poor comfort. And it can become worse again. The world is full of parents and teachers who shake their foolish heads and turn up their old eyes and cross their flat chests with horror at the depravity of youth: children are so disobedient, so naughty, so self-willed and talk so disrespectfully to their elders! . . . And what do we do, we who know better?"

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