is thereon asked, Does he assent to the formula? on which, as he
still continues crying and can obviously make no answer, some one of the friends
comes forward and undertakes to sign the document on his behalf, feeling sure
(so he says) that the child would do it if he only knew how, and that he will
release the present signer from his engagement on arriving at maturity. The
friend then inscribes the signature of the child at the foot of the parchment,
which is held to bind the child as much as though he had signed it himself.
    Even this, however, does not fully content them, for they feel a little
uneasy until they have got the child's own signature after all. So when he is
about fourteen, these good people partly bribe him by promises of greater
liberty and good things, and partly intimidate him through their great power of
making themselves actively unpleasant to him, so that though there is a show of
freedom made, there is really none; they also use the offices of the teachers in
the Colleges of Unreason, till at last, in one way or another, they take very
good care that he shall sign the paper by which he professes to have been a free
agent in coming into the world, and to take all the responsibility of having
done so on to his own shoulders. And yet, though this document is obviously the
most important which anyone can sign in his whole life, they will have him do so
at an age when neither they nor the law will for many a year allow anyone else
to bind him to the smallest obligation, no matter how righteously he may owe it,
because they hold him too young to know what he is about, and do not consider it
fair that he should commit himself to anything that may prejudice him in after
years.
    I own that all this seemed rather hard, and not of a piece with the many
admirable institutions existing among them. I once ventured to say a part of
what I thought about it to one of the Professors of Unreason. I did it very
tenderly, but his justification of the system was quite out of my comprehension.
I remember asking him whether he did not think it would do harm to a lad's
principles, by weakening his sense of the sanctity of his word and of truth
generally, that he should be led into entering upon a solemn declaration as to
the truth of things about which all that he can certainly know is that he knows
nothing - whether, in fact, the teachers who so led him, or who taught