FEMINIST DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE DISASTROUS TO INFANT-LIFE AND HUMAN FACULTY

"A hundred men may make an encampment, but it takes a woman to make a home."—Chinese Proverb.

I

The paths alike of progress and of happiness lie, obviously, in the ever further dignifying and enhancement of the functions of home and of wifehood, by way of every further interest and charm that higher, fairer Womanhood confers.

The chief cause of latter-day conjugal unrest and disaffection is to be found—not in the natural state of marriage, but in a decline of those personal traits which make for happiness therein. Girls brought up as now, without home-interests or training, but, on the contrary, with mainly self-realising and self-absorbing aims and pursuits, are deficient not only in domestic aptitudes but lamentably also in emotional qualities. And the home-life without the emotions to give values to it, is like a fine air played on the keyboard of a piano from which have been removed the strings that transform the movements of the fingers into melody.

So keenly self-centred the majority of women have become, so bent upon their hobbies and careers, as to have lost nearly all of that sympathetic adaptiveness natural to woman, which enables her to forget—and to forget with pleasure—her own in the personality and interests of others.

How eagerly latter-day girls seek refuge from their boredom in the tennis-court, the Bridge-table, the dance, or in some other mode of direct action which entails but little temperamental tax or output!

To such degree the sexes are now drilled to the same standards, interests, and points-of-view, that neither brings to the other any new thing, of freshness, of colour, or of inspiration. The interchange is only too often a competitive struggle, indeed, as to which shall know (or shall appear to know) more than the other knows (or appears to know) of topics equally trite to both. There is little or nothing of the zest and glamour of a delightful picnic of two; whereat each keeps producing some new and unexpected thing to supplement the new and unexpected of the other. Modern woman has no novelty in language even for her mate, but deals him back his own slang—a vernacular which among women of the working-classes not seldom takes the forms of blasphemy and obscenity, wholly disqualifying for the rearing of children. As, indeed, do the coarse and vulgar phrases in vogue now among the cultured of the sex. In view of woman's native faculty of music and her subtle aptitude for naming (as for nick-naming), one cannot doubt that she it was who mothered Language. Yet now-a-days, adopting virile lingo, her "rotten," "stick-it," and the like are murdering the infant of her quondam genius. And what genius it was, that gave birth to our surpassing mother-tongue!

In case of engagement between a young man and his bored one—whom, by the way, although he may suspect that the relation is not all that it might be, he never suspects of being bored—manlike, he trusts to marriage "to put everything right." Yet although the newly-wedded more and more relieve themselves of the strain of a honeymoon, with its unmitigated (or inimitable) company of two, a month or six weeks of wedlock find most young modern couples wofully at cross-purposes. Possession has freed the man of the obligation to woo. And when the wooing—which had engendered for the woman a flattering and intoxicating sense of being a coveted prize—comes to a more or less abrupt ending, she feels herself defrauded.

He too! Because while Courtship is man's affair, Marriage is woman's. And where love is not, to recruit and quicken passion and to take the place of novelty, the wane of honeymoons is sad indeed.

(There are faults and failings on the bridegroom's part, 'tis true. That belongs to another story, however. Sufficient for these pages is the unpleasing task of holding a mirror to the faults of a single sex.)

It should be remembered that men, for the most part, are not eager to marry. Considering the nature of the bond, with its lifelong obligations, responsibilities and sacrifices, this is little to be wondered at. A week after marriage a wife may be crippled by an accident, may become insane; or may otherwise be thrown, more or less a burden, on her husband's hands. Or she may develop disagreeable and wholly uncongenial traits. In spite of which, even though they wreck his happiness, he will have bound himself to her—and will have bound himself to maintain her—till death them parts.

He too, of course, may turn out wholly unsatisfactory. That belongs likewise to the other story. But from the material standpoint, the onus of support which falls on him, and which, in the case of an invalided or of an obnoxious wife, may prove nothing but a carking care, makes the liabilities unequal.

It is, doubtless, because of these his greater material obligations and responsibilities, that passion has been planned to beset man more urgently than woman. And had Church and State not taken advantage of his inherent, chivalrous instinct, and so turned it to account, both for his own moral uplifting and for the founding and maintenance of the family, woman and society—and man, accordingly—would have remained at very low grades of development.

II

Among other "wrongs" resented by women is that his obligation and his economic means to support a wife have endowed the male, in the majority of cases, with the lordly prerogative of selecting his mate. On her side, while having much to gain materially by marriage, unless she is unusually attractive she has but little range of choice.

And yet this masculine prerogative of selection has served as the strongest incentive to the culture both of higher attribute and charm in woman. Failing that economic struggle which has been man's spur to development, this incentive has operated vastly to her benefit; inducing her parents to educate and to enhance her gifts, and influencing her to do the like for herself. A proportion of women have always been self-supporting, of course. But their work has been mainly in fields of unskilled labour, and has lacked, accordingly, the stimulus of competition. The goal of marriage has not only supplied thus the element of emulation, but it has turned Woman-culture in the direction of developing personal traits and morale, rather than industrial or professional specialisations. And this has been the right direction, seeing that the rÔle of the sex is one demanding personal qualities and virtues rather than economic technicalities.

As regards human values, it is a higher privilege to be a charming personality than to be a successful stockbroker. So that in this, as in other things, woman has been privileged by her disabilities.

III

An ever-increasing number of working-class girls, on leaving school, enter a work-shop, a factory, or an office, and spend their time and powers in minor mechanical tasks; gumming labels on jam-pots, making match-boxes or tags for boot-laces, addressing envelopes, and other such employments, deadening to female intelligence, impulse and temperament. Their minds and natures become too warped and narrowed to adapt later, with ease and interest, to the many and varied intelligent functions of the home. They escape thence, accordingly, after a few months or years of marriage (supposing them to have given up their industrial tasks for a space even), and abandoning home and children, return to the old narrow, mechanical routine, to which alone their poor stultified brains have been shaped. In the education of girls, the Subconscious mimetic element in their impressionable natures should be borne in mind. It may be turned to excellent, as to disastrous account.

M. Vologotsky, head of the Omsk Government, has called attention to a significant phenomenon of modern Russian life—namely, that the women take no interest in their homes. This he attributes to their low states of culture. Could they but be persuaded to become "house-proud"—with all that this means and entails—he considers that the task of the Regeneration of this vast unhappy, although singularly gifted, people would be greatly furthered.

Constitutional deterioration, inherited or acquired, entailing defective sex-development, causes many young working-women to be deficient in the maternal instinct, whence spring fondness for and interest in children. The same defective sex-development, disqualifying them for wifehood, results in the vast majority of working-class wives lapsing, after a few years of marriage with normal, virile young men, into haggard, neurasthenic wrecks.

The whole of this vital and important department of the woman-organisation is not only ignored in so far as scope for normal development is concerned, but, despised as subserving inferior and "merely physical" functions, every other capacity and aptitude is fostered or forced at the expense of constitutional reserves and resources which belong, by rights of Life and Love, to this. With the result that the vast majority of modern women are physically unfitted for, as an increasing number are temperamentally averse to the sex-relation—fons et origo of Life.

IV

To such degree the doctrine of Expedience and Self-for-Self-solely has spread that there are women who seek now to escape wholly the natural pangs of childbirth. Such persuade their doctors to induce labour a month or more before term; in order that the smaller-sized infant may be born with less discomfort to themselves. Others restrict their diet or abstain from certain foods, in order that the babe, starved thus and ill-nourished before birth, shall be soft and frail and easier of delivery. Dread of pain at whatsoever cost to the future of a human being—and that being their own child—actuates these unnatural and pusillanimous practices.

It is becoming a vogue for expectant mothers of the wealthier classes to enter Maternity-Homes, where, in luxurious surroundings, they are enabled, under spinal anÆsthesia (Twilight Sleep), to conclude their mother-function without suffering or inconvenience; lying in a torpor of crass insensibility while the greatest of Human Events is taking place in them. Meantime, the sensitive infant-body is dosed with the powerful drug circulating in the maternal blood.

But—whither is all this trending? Can we believe that true intelligence and progress consist in grasping greedily all the pleasures and the privileges to be had from life, and basely shirking all the hardships? Can we believe that—suffering and effort being the laws alike of Life and Progress, and the rungs whereby we have climbed the Evolutionary ladder—we can continue to climb when, with short-sighted selfishness, we shall have stripped the ladder of its rungs? The humane use of chloroform duly assuages the worst pangs. While the fine courage, fortitude and sweetness wherewith the soul of woman fares forth naturally upon her Great Adventure, to meet this the Apotheosis of human pain, prove and still further enhance her nobility. Even weak and flimsy women rise to greatness at this crisis. Powers they had never glimmered in themselves emerge and armour them, and—be it remembered—leave eternal records upon mind and character; striking spiritual roots still deeper into living function.

V

With characteristic Feminist materialism, Olive Schreiner lightly dismisses Maternity as a merely "passive" form of labour.

Heaven save the mark! Is it passive so to equip a microscopic cell with living human powers and aspirations that, within the space of months, it makes that miraculous pilgrimage of the pre-natal evolutionary ascent whereby it becomes Man? Passive—so to serve for living environment to this developing organism as to supply it with the multiple, complex and diverse elements, material and vital, biological and psychical, required for the manifold needs and adjustments of its evolving life and faculties?

During the ante-natal months of this miraculous Ascent, the embryo "climbs its genealogical tree," as biologists style it. That is to say, it passes, in turn, through all the countless evolutionary phases of all the countless evolutionary ages whereof Humanity is the culminating product. Fashioning out of formlessness, slowly it attains to form. Shaping, shaping, ever marvellously shaping, it evolves, in succession, through fish, amphibian and other rudimentary life-grades. Climbing, climbing, ever marvellously climbing, day by day, to nobler heights, it is transformed at last to human shape; lower human first, then higher human, and finally to the highest human possible to its stock, its parentage, and the resources, physical and psychical, available to it.

It is the most stupendous miracle in Nature; a miracle so sacred and so tender that every man in passing an expectant mother should mentally bow the knee. Individually, socially, morally—she may be a person of but small significance. But because of the mystery of Life enshrined within her, she is a living Testament of Evolution. The pregnant woman is, moreover, pregnant with the destiny of Races.

During those ten lunar months there is enacted in the tender darkness of the mother's womb the whole wonderful drama of the Human transfiguration. With lightning swiftness, the evolving babe climbs in the footsteps that its countless ancestors had trod, in forms innumerable, along the route interminable of the Human Advent. In flashes of progressive, infinitesimal transitions, through incalculable phases and mutations, the single cell of double parentage unfolds the marvel occulted in it. Until at last, the living product stands triumphant on the topmost branch of its genealogical tree, a perfect human babe awaiting birth; the last achievement of its Race, the latest and most perfect bud of its hereditary stock.

In so far as all this occurs subconsciously within the mother, the materialist may lightly dismiss the evolutionary marvel as a "passive" form of labour. But although subconscious, these unceasing processes demand inevitably such proportional vital potential and activities on her part from whom the powers energising it are derived, as to be a continued tax and strain upon her strength and health. There are women who feel this strain but little. A rare few of these because they are so richly endowed with maternal potence that the subconscious processes have remained, as Nature doubtless intended, for the most part subconscious and painless. Far more often, however, when Maternity exacts but little from the mother, it is because she is contributing but little to the child. I have observed that the finer a child in physique and in brain, the greater the stress and disability the mother had suffered prior to its birth.

VI

Indifferent, notwithstanding, to all the vital activities and psychical evolutions taking place within the mysterious laboratory of the mother's body; reckless of the circumstance that any interference with, or hampering of the least of these must inevitably jar, and warp, the delicate complexes of infantine development, we scruple not to strain and burden, to harass and deplete, the prospective mother even further by strenuous breadwinning. Her whole physiology and psychology are profoundly altered by her momentous condition; by the new adjustments to the needs of the developing babe, of the maternal circulation and digestion, assimilation and elimination, mentality and intricate nervous constitution and processes. Fatigue, noise, turmoil, effort, shock—any one or all of these which are inseparable from industrial employment—cannot but injuriously re-act upon the delicate evolutions mysteriously occurring in her.

The infant brain is complete at birth. From its lowest to its highest departments, all the marvel of exquisitely-delicate construction and association of its complex cells is achieved pre-natally. And according or not as her vital powers have been rich and otherwise unexpended, and according or not as the embryological processes of development have occurred in quietude and freedom from strain upon the mother's part, will be the quality for life, in vigour and in sanity, of her child's intelligence and character.

VII

In view of those lower biological grades through which the embryo passes before arriving at the human stage, it is inevitable that maternal over-fatigue, shock or undue effort may arrest its physical development temporarily upon any of these lower levels. And such arrest must inevitably entail some warp or bias of a lower animal phase; which may so impress itself permanently on embryonic development as to detract more or less gravely from the final transition.

It is, doubtless, for this reason that many modern humans show in their configuration, degrees of reversion to ape, sheep, fish and other lower species.

Shock or nervous perturbation in the expectant mother may occasion, in the babe, appalling monstrosity, or such minor defects as cleft-palate, hare-lip, and other deformities. Showing the vital and—inevitably—the psychological effects on offspring, for good or for evil, of maternal conditions and impressions.

The Germans record that of infants born during the war, a number are gravely degenerate of type, an infant-degeneracy attributed by some to the creed of Hate obsessing German mothers. The same phenomenon is seen however in the offspring of mothers exhausted by religious preachings and marchings, in furtherance of their creed of Christian Love.

For Biology recognises no Theology except its own—that of Evolution.

At a representative meeting of London doctors, it was stated recently that the number of imbecile infants now coming into existence with us is no less than appalling.

A medical wiseacre has adventured the amazing dictum that Every infant is born healthy! He might, with equal truth, have said that every infant is born wealthy, or is born a Chinaman. Some infants are born alive, a great number are born dead. And between those born alive and healthy and the still-born, lie all the infinite gradations of constitutional condition between life and health, between disease and death.

One child inherits from its parents a tuberculous tendency; another a neurotic, another a strain of alcoholism or other taint. One is born blind or a hopeless idiot; another with hare-lip or clubbed-foot; another with congenital heart-disease. One babe is born with a beautiful head; all its brain-faculties nobly developed and splendidly balanced. Another is born headless, or with a skull which, from crown to brows, is a rapid descent—showing lack of all the brain-powers involved in higher mentality; is born, in short, of criminal inherency.

The degrees in which individuals strive against inherited tendencies differ greatly, as do the life-conditions wherein their will and moral power are tested—to make or to break them. Man is not, of course, the creature merely of his heredity or of his environment. But he whose mother has equipped him with physical defects instead of with qualities, even though he fight against his disabilities, is obviously handicapped for the life-struggle. A great musician may charm fine music from a poor fiddle, but in no degree so fine as he will bring out of a more perfect instrument.

VIII

A phenomenon which has baffled vital statisticians is a curious relation between the Birth-rate and Infant-Mortality. A high birth-rate is found to be associated with a high rate of infant-mortality; while with a lower birth-rate, the death-rate among infants and children decreases.

Long and careful observation has left me in no doubt as to the cause of this phenomenon. Which is, that under strain of disease, of industrial exhaustion or strenuous activities of any sort, but particularly as result of the constitutional drain entailed by pregnancy, mothers may so draw upon the vital powers of their children in order to recruit their own, as to occasion fatal illness in their families.

The evil is so great in its effects, not only upon the health and constitution of the rising generation, but, as well, upon the physical and mental development thereof, that such maternal depletion is, I am assured, a cause of widespread disease among children; of infantile paralysis, degeneracy and mortality. It is reason enough, in all conscience, to call for the legalised prohibition of all mothers with young families from engaging in professional or industrial employment.

Because although such depletion of her children's health is graver in degree during a mother's pregnancy, at all times over-worked, sickly, or strenuous women recruit their powers from the constitutional resources of others. Only, indeed, by such depletion of their neighbours can many of our present-day neurotic, overactive women (some of them with ill-nourished bodies and feeble assimilation, but with, nevertheless, indefatigable energies) contrive to keep going.

Strong-willed, self-centred women, keen in pursuit of business, athletics or pleasure, will, by sapping the nervous forces of these, keep all the members of their households—husband, children, servants—more or less de-vitalised, neurasthenic and characterless; one or more actually invalided, perhaps.

If nervous energy is, indeed, a complex form of electrical energy, this nervous interchange is intelligible; obeying the law that bodies under-charged with electricity charge themselves from bodies more highly charged, until equilibrium is established.

Who among doctors does not know the wan and listless, semi-paralytic babes that working-mothers—and most particularly pregnant working-mothers—bring to the consulting-room? The hapless victims lie limply, or sit hunched upon the woman's lap, nerveless, wasted, apathetic; faces white and hopeless, abdomen lax and tumid; the blenched limbs soft as butter, weak and dangling. They are suffering, perhaps, from some specific ailment, bronchitis, paralysis, gastric or intestinal troubles; perhaps only from mysterious wasting and inanition. Not seldom there is an elder child too, white and weak and fretful, and the subject of "infantilism"; growth stunted, development arrested. Such children, in their mental hebetude and physical degeneracy, suggest a degree of cretinism. And in the suggestion, a possible cause appears for the cretinous offspring of the hard-living, over-worked mothers of Swiss cantons.

IX

Drummond says of Motherhood:

"Even on its physical side ... this was the most stupendous task Evolution ever undertook."

While on the physical side, we see that Nature has made infancy and childhood increasingly helpless as species advances in evolutionary values, in order to call forth increasingly intelligent, and sympathetic response and resource in the mother. Feminism in unmaking the mother, is undoing the labours of countless ages of evolutionary advance. The intensifying mentality of woman, destined for the more subtly intelligent and sympathetic nurture of the Race's increasingly valuable and complex offspring, is being diverted, more and more, by Feminist counsel and practice from human and vital into merely economic channels.

Life is so constituted that its most cruel disabilities and evils are borne inevitably by the children in the van of the Great March. These hapless ones it is—soft buds pushing from the Human Tree—that bear the brunt of the evolutionary impulse.

In the main, the very finest children of The Poor succumb. Because the higher the organism, the more complex and delicately-fitted to its vital needs its life-conditions require to be. Briars flourish where rose-trees die. Degenerate children struggle through where better types go under. We are not ready, it is true, for exotic humans. But we need urgently, indeed, all the healthy, intelligent, well-balanced stock we can produce.

A certain uniformity of type is secured by the expedients of Natural Selection; by that continual correction of premature evolutionary unfoldment which results from the checks and prunings of developmental exigencies—in the necessary acclimatisation and adaptation of the young and tender organism to environment. And Nature herself provides all the checks and prunings required, in her tests of teething, of measles, and the other diseases and trials of infancy and childhood.

The respiration-curves and the brain pulse-waves of young infants show serious disturbance as result of sudden loud noises. The consequent nervous jar perturbs both breathing and circulation.

The whole organisation of an infant is so delicate and is so subtly balanced as to require the gentlest possible treatment. One sees on the faces of infants and young children a chronic look of painful expectancy. Their brows are knitted as though to brace their hyper-sensitive systems for the next distressing shock. Women accustomed to hard, laborious work (or sports) lose power to adjust their movements to these delicate needs. And when, unkind and impatient, they fly at the unfortunates and shake or beat or scold them violently, they have no suspicion that for hours afterwards, perhaps for days, the children's nervous systems may be so shattered and disorganised, digestion and assimilative powers so impaired, as to interfere gravely with growth and development. Degrees of "shock," akin to shell-shock, result from such maternal violence and chronic terrorism; occasioning feeble-mindedness, morbid timidity, mental hebetude and, moreover, subconscious impressions, which, later in life, may emerge as obsessions, or as other forms of insanity. Fear is the most shattering and paralysing of the emotions. Yet not only brought up by hand, the majority of our little ones are brought up by violent hand.

All day long and during every moment of it, a thousand delicate processes of growth and unfoldment and of intricate adjustments are going on mysteriously within the shaping brain and body of a child. Subconsciously, these are a continued tax and strain; making him hyper-sensitive, irritable, cross, perhaps, for causes that appear inadequate. A child is like a convalescent, in that he uses up rapidly for growth and development all the nutritive material and vital energy at his disposal. This is true of healthy, well-nurtured children. What then of these child-martyrs of The Poor, who in addition to the strain of growth, are ill-fed, poisoned by unsuitable foods; are sickly, rickety, bronchitic, dyspeptic, syphilitic, phthisical? Nevertheless, all the maternal care these miserables receive are such rough dregs of kindness and of patience as may be left over from the toil of their working-mothers' hard, exhausting days.

It is no less than monstrous that our laws allow the nation's babes and children—to whom are due all the best resources of maternal care and tenderness and duly-trained maternal powers—to be thus martyred. As substitute for the home and for their mothers—which are every child's birthright—more and more, infants and young children are consigned now to CrÈches; chill institutions of alien atmosphere, alien surroundings, alien nurses, where, unmothered, they are ciphers among other unmothered alien ciphers. Yet babies and young children are so pathetically constituted that they prefer blows from their mothers to caresses from strangers.

X

The life-story written in the faces of the great majority of our Twentieth-Century babes and children is a terrible one, in its revelation of tortured helplessness, hopeless resignation, unnatural fortitude, blank despair. See them sunk, limp and dejected, in their prams or go-carts, eyes staring forward on the dreary waste their lives are; limbs dangling, like those of toys with broken springs.

In cities, mothers, ignorant of the shock and injury which noise and turmoil inflict upon these sensitive brains and nerves, wheel them amid jostling crowds—in order that they themselves may enjoy the excitements of the shops. At the low level of their prams, they breathe air vitiated by the passers-by; are in the exhausting whirl and press of swirling nerve-currents. In their poor ill-made carriages, they are jerked abruptly, now up, now down, at every kerb; with no more care or tenderness than though they were baskets of clothes. They sit patient, leaden, apathetic; cruelly strapped for hours together in one position; neither pulse of health nor spirit in them.

In cold weather, their heads but thinly thatched with hair are bare. So too their limbs; though warmth is life to young, developing creatures. In hot weather, the sun beats mercilessly down upon their hatlessness, their exquisitely-sensitive brains but slightly shielded by their thin un-ossified skulls. Degrees of sunstroke, with lifelong injury to health and faculty, occur. They knit their pale brows in fruitless attempt to defend their weak eyes from the glare. Many keep their lids close shut, to protect both eyes and brain from the nerve-shattering solar rays, which are far too powerful to be allowed to fall, untempered, upon an infant's highly-sensitive body. With closed eyes, the poor things miss all the joys of their ride; the colour and movement about them, and the spurs to intelligence these should supply. Their unobservant mothers and nurses suppose them to be sleeping!

Children old enough to walk are walked to stages—sometimes to extremes of exhaustion. You may see them dragging heavily along, with wan, exhausted faces; peevish and cross, and scolded and shaken and slapped for being peevish and cross. Exhaustion from such over-fatigue will keep a child below par for days; checking its growth and development—to say nothing of its happiness. Children derive but little benefit from their holiday changes to sea or country, because of the exertions forced upon them, or the too strenuous play to which they are exhorted.

Children who go bare-headed suffer, in large number, from eye-strain, with resulting permanent frown. As too, from ear-ache and from ear-diseases; from headache and toothache. In as many as 75 per cent. of school-children, vision is defective.

The obsessing aim of many mothers is to "harden" their children. Yet no more than a clay model in the shaping may be hardened and set, should the process be applied to children in the shaping.

Healthy children are inevitably delicate children, because of that highly-sensitive re-activity to surroundings which not only characterises but conduces to the developmental state. (Such delicacy must not be confused with sickliness.) The finer the organisation the longer it takes (within normal limits) to come to full growth. Our greatest men and women were delicate in youth. Hardy children are always of inferior type—for the most part, plain and shrewd and unimaginative, insensitive, unlovable. They have matured (have adapted to environment, that is) precociously. Evolution of higher faculty has been prematurely arrested in them.

Modern children are described as "super-children," for their abnormal sharpness and worldly perspicacity. They are merely precocious, which is to say, they have missed their childhood. And too early development entails inevitably early decline. Not only America, but England now has produced a grey-haired boy of ten!

No less amazing than it is lamentable is the light neglect by the majority of cultured mothers, of their grave maternal obligations. From earliest infancy, they hand over their children, body and soul, to the ignorance, the carelessness, the cruelty (not seldom to the viciousness even), of stranger-women of the uncultured classes; women of whose character and disposition they know nothing, and who are only too often unfitted by nature, by upbringing, and by habit for this most delicate, difficult and important of all human tasks.

It is by no means uncommon to find prostitutes, grown too old for a trade that has vitiated every cell and secretion of their bodies (to say nothing of mental vitiation), officiating in the capacity of nursemaid to children of culture.

Every child is a new creation, with a highly specialised organisation of mind and of body. For the nurture and best development of these, are required high degrees of intelligence, of understanding and of sympathy in treatment. To realise its idiosyncrasies, constitutional and temperamental, and to adapt to these in its rearing and surroundings, with respect to diet, exercise, play, sleep, moral supervision and discipline, demand intuitive perceptiveness, intelligent discrimination, and practical resource such as no other department of life demands—or is worth.

Notwithstanding all this, mothers who can afford to shelve their duty upon paid substitutes abandon the most complex and sensitive, the most beautiful and valuable, and moreover, the most helpless thing in Nature—the mind of a child—to be shaped and coloured, during all the most impressionable years of its development, by persons with neither aptitude nor faculty for this supremely complex and difficult function. In place of so adapting its environment to the child-organism as to enable it, fenced within the tender mother-fold, to enjoy to the full and to develop to the full the lovely, inspiring beliefs and illusions of natural childhood, latter-day mothers now cruelly rob their little ones of this fructifying phase, by prematurely forcing worldly knowledge and distrusts upon them, in precocious adjustment to mature view-points and conditions from which they should be carefully secluded.

In that mysterious Mind-department, the Subconsciousness, with its highly sensitised brain-tablets, every smallest happening of a lifetime—scenes, experiences, mental impressions—are photographed, to be stored for ever after as ineffaceable records. And though, perhaps, wholly forgotten, these subconscious records nevertheless colour and influence for ever after every thought and impulse and action. Sometimes they flash up as memories. They can be recalled under hypnotism.

The young mind is like an unfurnished house. The rooms are empty. There are no pictures on the walls. But its unblotted, exquisitely-sensitised spaces are ceaselessly filming indelible records of everything seen and felt and apprehended. One impression may correct, or may distort, others. Or that right point-of-view which is judgment may focus all impressions in the true perspective which reveals their true values and proportions. But until such judgment has been formed by mental development, it is vitally important that all the impressions absorbed by young minds, whether of their life-conditions and associates, of books or of plays, shall be fair and simple and wholesome.

Thus, the foundations of mind and of character are laid in clean, intelligising and uplifting influences.

XI

While we deplore, as appalling, that during the first fifteen months of War, 109,725 of our fighting men were killed or died, the returns of the Registrar-General show that during the twelve months of the peace preceding War, there died 140,957 of the nation's children, at less than five years old; 95,608 of these at less than a year old.

Consider it! War, with its destructive engines of bomb and shell, more or less swiftly and painlessly kills just over a hundred thousand men, in the course of fifteen months. Peace, with its destructive transgressions against Nature, kills in less time a far greater number of defenceless babes and children, by slow and more or less torturing forms of disease. Babies, even when unhealthy, come into existence endowed with a certain Life-potential. And they struggle hard and painfully to live. It is amazing to see the odds against which the poor things battle; and battle successfully. It is only the fearfulness of the odds to which most of them are subjected that succeeds in killing them.

Pain and suffering are spurs to adult development. In children they are as needlessly cruel as they are permanently injurious. Far from fitting, they unfit them for life.

The ratio of mortality is no guide, of course, to the immeasurable injuries wrought to mind and body by these same fearful odds upon the children who survive; and who survive, maimed, diseased, degenerate, to live out lives of disability, of joylessness and ineffectiveness.

It will be said—and said truly—that much of this high infant-mortality results, not from maternal omissions, but from paternal commissions. Well, that alas! is another of the terrible wrongs against children which lie at the door of the sex. Were there not women whose lives are passed in engendering and transmitting the direst of all the diseases human evil has bred, the hapless imbecile and paralytic, the blind, the deaf, the ulcerous, the slowly-wasting, tortured little ones who fill our asylums and hospitals would not be.

At every turn the truth is more and more impressed, that the fate of Humanity rests, in some or other form, with its women. Woman is Redeemer; or she is Destroyer. Because, while man's province is the material, with its roots in temporal things, woman's province is the vital, with its roots and stem and blossom in functioning Life.

The burning wrongs of women? Alas! what are they beside the burning wrongs of helpless babes and children?

* * * * *

XII

An anomaly of Feminism is the admission, on the one hand, that Motherhood was woman's most valuable function, and her greatest claim on the community in days of barbarism, and the denial, on the other, that it is her most important function in civilisation.

The illogic of the position is patent.

That the production of savages should be primitive woman's chiefest claim to honour; while the production of highly-evolved and complex human beings should be civilised woman's least.

The potence and the values of fine motherhood are proven by the fact that every great, or good, or clever man or woman has been the child of a great, or good, or clever mother. Not of one who has made her mark in the world of affairs. Such, for the most part, have not reproduced at all. And when they have been mothers their children have been notably of inferior calibre.

On the other hand, bad men and bad women have in nearly every instance been sons or daughters of bad women.

Examples innumerable might be cited to show that both genius and moral greatness are variations (mutations) of the human species which have their origin in mother-genius and greatness.

Great scientists, it has been noted, have been sons of women characterised by intense love of Truth. The love of Truth in the mother—for Truth's sake—became in the executive, concrete mentality of the son an intuitive apprehension of the truths of Science, and an eager and indomitable aspiration to render these in terms of intellection.

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Shall woman leave to man no field at all of natural supremacy? Shall she not be content with her beautiful part as generatrix of Faculty, but must seek to be exponent too?

That all women do not marry—cannot marry, indeed, because of their preponderance in number over the other sex—is no reason for dissembling the truth that in wifehood and motherhood lie woman's most vital and valuable rÔles.

Nor is it warrant for training the whole sex as though none were destined to fulfil this, their natural and noblest—if not always, their happiest vocation.

XIII

Feminism repudiates, from time to time, the charge against it of belittling Motherhood. Yet how can it profess to credit the maternal function with due values or significance when it denies the obligations and responsibilities thereof, asks no economic concessions for it? And when, in place of demanding privileges indispensable to its exercise and complete fulfilment, it makes no distinction, in respect of work and the worker, between childless and unmarried women and mothers and expectant mothers? And this despite the fact that, for a period of eighteen months at very least, the mother's best vital resources belong by rights, biological and moral, to each babe she produces—nine for the pre-natal building of its body and brain, and nine for lactation.

Her moral obligation to nurse, and the criminality of her omission when able to do so, have been emphasised as follows by Sir J. Crichton-Browne:

"Dr. Robertson, Medical Officer of Health for Birmingham has shown that while the infant-mortality of breast-fed infants is 7·8 per 1000 births, that of infants receiving no breast-milk is 232 per 1000. And Sir Arthur Newsholme, Medical Adviser to the Local Government Board, has shown that the probability of death from epidemic diarrhoea is 54 times greater among infants fed on cow's milk than among those fed on breast-milk, and 150 times greater amongst infants fed on condensed milk.

"But it is not merely in a high infant death-rate that the evil effects of the want of breast-milk stand confessed. Where it does not kill it often maims, and is responsible for malnutrition, rickets, tuberculosis, and a multiplicity of ailments. Every doctor is familiar with the alabaster babies, flabby, limp, languid, and painfully pallid, who have never tasted their natural nutriment."

Dr. Truby King records the interesting fact that the finest calf-skin, known as Paris Calf, is obtained from calves reared by their mothers, in order to provide the finest veal for Paris. So supple and smooth-haired and superior is the skin of these mother-suckled creatures that dealers are able to distinguish it at once from the skin of calves that have been artificially fed.

About this, Mr. Horace G. Regnart kindly supplies me with the following significant data:

"If we feed a calf, 'on the bucket,' the calf's coat loses its shine and becomes dull. We say it is 'dead.' A couple of days is sufficient to deaden the coat. And it takes three weeks or a month 'on a cow' to get the gloss back. A quart of milk direct from the cow is as good as a gallon of milk out of a bucket.

"We do not attempt to feed our female calves so well as we feed the bulls. It is too costly. Our heifers are put on 'the bucket' when three days old. I buy a cow to rear my bull-calves on. I once reared a bull on 'the bucket' satisfactorily. But I gave him twelve gallons of new milk every day after he was five months old, and kept it up till he was fourteen months. One cow that gives three gallons does a calf just as well as twelve gallons vi the bucket, and is much cheaper. Some crack bulls have three and four five-gallon cows at once, and go to Shows with all their nurses in attendance.

"Once I reared a bull as we rear the heifers. But he was a failure. His daughters are only half the size they ought to be."

(An example of direct developmental inheritance—in terms of deterioration—from father to daughter.)

XIV

Comparing a calf with a human baby, it becomes self-evident that the diet suited for the large, crude creature which trots about on four legs shortly after birth must be wholly unsuited to the delicate digestion and the subtle psychological needs of the small and complex, highly-organised human infant, which remains so long a helpless infant.

The all-important proteid of every order of creature differs from that of every other. Before any form of alien proteid can be built into the body of a living organism, the digestion and assimilation of this creature must first have laboriously disintegrated and reconstructed it to the form of its own individual proteid.

The Irish tradition that persons not nursed during infancy by their mothers are beings without souls has much to justify it. Even the ill-nourished, sickly babes of working-mothers have an essentially human look in eyes and features, possess far more of nervous power, and are of appreciably higher and more intelligent psychology than are the bottle-fed infants of the cultured.

The bottle-fed start handicapped for life, both in constitution and mentality. It is safe to say that all great men and women have been suckled by their mothers or have come of stock thus humanly nurtured. That they were thus humanly nurtured during their momentous first nine months of life, is the reason, doubtless, why so many of our greatest men have sprung from humble origin.

The incapacity of a mother to nourish the babe she has borne should be known for a mark of degeneracy—sign, too, that she was unfitted to have borne a child, because deficient in the vital reserve requisite to carry her maternal function to its normal biological and psychological conclusion. Just as a statesman or a general would be held unfitted for his function, if he should lack the physical and mental enterprise to complete his national undertakings.

That for the nine months preceding its birth the infant obtains its nourishment directly from its mother's blood, and for nine months after birth it obtains this, normally, from her milk—her digestive processes having so assimilated the originally brute and vegetable proteids of her food that these are now human proteids, and are ready, therefore, to be built into the infant's body with the least possible tax upon its own assimilative powers—proves a number of important facts.

First: that an infant's digestive powers remain, normally, for nine months after birth, in a more or less embryonic state; slowly and gradually developing capacity to convert the products of the brute and vegetable kingdoms into forms suitable for building into its human organisation. (Just as we see the digestive organs of the child progressively developing power to assimilate an adult dietary.)

Secondly: that the infant's digestion remains thus undeveloped obviously in order that as little as possible of its vital power may be expended in the complex processes of assimilation, all available vital-power being urgently required for its exhaustingly rapid brain- and body-building.

Thirdly: that where an artificial diet forces precocious development upon the infant-digestion—since all precocity is degeneracy, all the organs concerned in digestion will be, necessarily, more or less structurally defective and functionally inefficient; as a consequence of not having been permitted time and rest to develop slowly and stably over the normal allotted period. (Proof is supplied by the premature development of teeth, which occurs in artificially-fed babies some months before dentition is normally due. And these teeth and those that succeed them are of such perishable structure that present-day children need perpetual dental repairs.)

Fourthly: that such misapplication of vital resources for the premature development and abnormal functions of precocious digestive organs entails inevitably corresponding loss of vital power for general development.

Fifthly—and by no means lastly, but perhaps most important of all: that since the infant-digestion is quite incapable of properly converting brute and vegetable-proteids into human proteid, infants artificially fed must necessarily build into their brains and bodies lower-grade proteids—and proteids so imperfectly assimilated as to be something less than human, and, accordingly, more or less brute or vegetable still in their inherences. And since all living cells and tissues reproduce upon the plan of the parent-cells and tissues they were derived from, it is clear that the abnormal cells and tissues constructed of these half-brute, or half-vegetable proteids must be abnormal; unstable and degenerate, and prone to lapse readily to still further degrees of deterioration and disease.

Hence a source of our neurotic, neurasthenic, adenoid-afflicted, mentally-defective and otherwise diseased children. Hence too the increasing criminality—which is animality, of course—that characterises a considerable proportion of the rising generation.

Each further generation artificially fed in infancy can but deviate still further from the Human Normal, becoming ever less human; brain and body-cells reproducing themselves, throughout life, on the plan of their infant-construction of half-brute or half-vegetable proteids. One sees the ox in the dull, soulless eyes, in the bovine flesh, the stolid faces, and in the crude animal natures of many modern little ones, to whom calf-diet was fed before they had developed the digestive power of transforming this into substance highly vitalised enough for human brain and body-building. And the less their systems have rebelled against and have rejected, but, on the contrary, have conformed to and have thriven upon such brute-diet, the cruder are their organisations. Of this order are the insensate child-monsters who win prizes at Baby-shows.

To one who realises that, of all the powers of Woman, the ability to nurse her babe is second in importance only to her first and vital function of producing it, the cry and clamour and impassioned fallacy that have swirled around the trivial detail of her Suffrage-disabilities show grotesque beside the human tragedy of her increasing biological disability and her increasing psychical aversion to fulfil this indispensable and sacred mother-office. To despise which, as being a function woman possesses in common with the humbler creatures, is as narrow-sighted as it would be to scorn the genius of Shakespeare because both dog and pig, poor things! possess brains. Moreover, in forfeiting this maternal faculty, woman reverts to the mode of those crude rudimentary species below the Mammalia.

Notwithstanding all this, Feminism, in its grim materialism, blind to the mystical beauty of Life and the sacredness of Individuality, regards women mainly as parts of an economic machinery. And to serve as such, it standardises all in body, mind and aptitude, to economic ends; the young and tender girls whose shaping frames are shaping to become the mystical looms of evolving Humanity; the young wives in whom love and marriage have set mysterious processes in motion; the young pregnant mothers in whom the shuttle of Life is already marvellously flying, interweaving the luminous threads of a soul with a body of flesh.

Nature made women ministrants of Love and Life, for the creation of an ever more healthful and efficient, a nobler and more joyous Humanity. Feminism degrades them to the status of industrial mechanisms, whereof the commercial products are the chiefest values, and children no more than bye-products.

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And what bye-products they are! God help them!—Who alone can help them—this pathetic rubble of pallid, sickly, suffering, and dejected infant- and child-Life; the violet-hued babies, with their dull eyes glazed by misery, their leaden, half-paralysed limbs; the blind and crippled, halt and deaf, the imbecile and feeble-minded children, apathetic, neurasthenic, joyless; as too, on the other hand, the low-browed, sturdy and soulless, or the debased and evil—All the generation of degeneracy which our deteriorate and enfeebled looms of womanhood are grinding out to-day.

Though shut from sight and thought, in the prisons, hospitals and other institutions of our modern civilisations is an ever-swelling, ever-rising, further-menacing tide of diseased, defective, insane and criminal mankind, product of ours and of those others' violations of Natural Law; clogging the River of Life, choking the Springs of Evolution, damming the current of Progress.