The curious thing about the particularly pernicious form of lying which deals with racial things in the presence of childhood is that we have the habit of thinking it quite innocent. Indeed we have even acquired the habit of thinking it one of the charming form of lies; hence when we are in a reforming mood, seeking for the origins of the wrongs we are trying to put right, we pass these “charming” lies by, thinking them harmless. Where did each one of us first learn to lie? _Nearly every one who is now grown up got his (or her) first lesson in lying at his mother’s knee._ To the little child, in his narrow but ever widening world, the mother is the supreme ruler, the all-wise provider of food, clothes, pleasures and pains. The mother (the child instinctively feels) must be also the source of wisdom. Question after question about himself and his surroundings springs up in the baby mind. Mother is asked them all, and for every one she has some sort of an answer. Then inevitably, at three or four, or five years old comes the question:--“Mother, where did you find me?”--“Mother, how was I born?” Then comes the lie. The child is told about the doctor bringing him in a bag--or a stork flying in through the window--or the accidental finding under the gooseberry bush. All children delight in fairy tales, but instinctively they know very well the difference between a fairy tale which is recounted to them as a story in answer to their mood of “make-believe” and a fiction which is putting them off when they are seeking the truth. If the mother who feels herself too ignorant or too self-conscious to answer the truth to the child’s questions takes him on her knee and deliberately tells him in a “make-believe” mood a fairy tale, the child will then not feel that the mother has lied. _He will feel, however, that he must ask some one else for the truth._ But most mothers give the answer containing the fiction of the gooseberry bush, or whatever it may be, in a manner indicating that that is what the child must believe, and the child receives the information as a serious answer to his serious question. It is then a lie, and a pernicious lie. Racial knowledge, instinct, whatever you like to call it, is subtler and stronger in baby minds than we dulled grown-ups are inclined to think. The youngest child has a half-consciousness that what its mother said in answer to this question was not true. Nurse, or auntie, a friend’s governess, or any one else who seems wise and powerful, is asked the same question when mother is not there, and the chances are that if mother had given the stork version auntie gives the gooseberry bush or some other fiction which she particularly favours. The baby ponders intermittently, inconsequently, perhaps at long intervals, perhaps after years, but ultimately it realizes that its mother lied to it.