If a child has access to a garden, it is easy to cultivate a more elaborate form of constructiveness. The first impulse of a child in a garden is to pick every attractive flower. It is easy to check this by prohibition, but mere prohibition is inadequate as an education. One wants to produce in the child the same respect for the garden that restrains the grown-ups from picking wantonly. The respect of the grown-up is due to realization of the labour and effort required to produce the pleasing result. By the time a child is three years old, he can be given a corner of the garden and encouraged to plant seeds in it. When they come up and blossom, his own flowers seem precious and wonderful; then he can appreciate that his mother’s flowers also must be treated with care. The elimination of thoughtless cruelty is to be effected most easily by developing an interest in construction and growth. Almost every child, as soon as he is old enough, wants to kill flies and other insects; this leads on to the killing of larger animals, and ultimately of men. In the ordinary English upper-class family, the killing of birds is considered highly creditable, and the killing of men in war is regarded as the noblest of professions. This attitude is in accordance with untrained instinct: it is that of men who possess no form of constructive skill, and are therefore unable to find any innocent embodiment of their will to power. They can make pheasants die and tenants suffer; when occasion arises, they can shoot a rhinoceros or a German. But in more useful arts they are entirely deficient, as their parents and teachers thought it sufficient to make them into English gentlemen. I do not believe that at birth they are any stupider than other babies; their deficiencies in later life are entirely attributable to bad education. If, from an early age, they had been led to feel the value of life by watching its development with affectionate proprietorship; if they had acquired forms of constructive skill; if they had been made to realize with apprehension how quickly and easily a slow product of anxious solicitude can be destroyed--if all this had formed part of their early moral training, they would not be so ready to destroy what others have similarly created or tended. The great educator in this respect in later life is parenthood, provided the instinct is adequately aroused. But in the rich this seldom happens, because they leave the care of their children to paid professionals; therefore we cannot wait till they become parents before beginning to eradicate their destructive tendencies.