Every genuine boy is a rebel and an anarch. If he were allowed to develop according to his own instincts, his own inclinations, society would undergo such a radical transformation as to make the adult revolutionary cower and cringe.

Holmes frames boyhood as a naturally insurgent state: “genuine” boys resist imposed order, testing boundaries and refusing to accept rules merely because they are customary. Calling the boy “a rebel and an anarch” is less a political program than a metaphor for untrained independence—an instinct to remake the world rather than inherit it. The second sentence sharpens the provocation: if children’s impulses were not disciplined into adult conformity, the resulting social change would be so sweeping that even self-styled revolutionaries would be frightened by its thoroughness. The quote thus critiques socialization as a process that tames radical possibility and turns original energy into acceptable, manageable adulthood.