The deeds of men and women proceed from certain radical elements of their nature, some evidently noble, others, when looked at askew, apparently ignoble. These elements are classed as instinctive. We are less intelligent than we think. Reason may occupy the throne, but the foundations upon which that throne is based are not of her making. To change the image, reason is the pilot, not the gale or the engine. She does not determine the goal, but only the course to that goal. We are what our nature makes us; our likes and our dislikes determine our acts, and we are guided to our self-determined ends by means of our intelligence. More often, indeed, we use our intelligence merely to justify to ourselves the likes and dislikes, the action and the inaction, which our instinctive tendencies have determined.

Many of our natural instincts, impulses, and emotions bear only remotely upon our present inquiry; as, for instance, the instinct of flight and the emotion of fear, the instinct of curiosity and the emotion of wonder, the instinct of pugnacity and the emotion of anger. Certain others, however, are not merely radical and permanent parts of our nature, but determine human existence, the greater part of its failures and successes, its folly and wisdom, its history and its destiny. Two of these—the parental and racial instincts—we must carefully consider here, and also, very briefly, a supposed third, the filial instinct. I am inclined to question whether such a specific entity as the filial instinct exists at all; it is rather, I believe, a product, by transmutation, of the parental instinct which, in its various forms and potencies and through the tender emotion which is its counterpart in the affective realm of our natures, is the noblest, finest, and most promising ingredient of our constitution.

Instinct and Emotion.—We must be sure, in the first place, that we have a sound idea of what we mean by the word "instinct." It is absurd, for instance, to speak of "acquiring a political instinct"—or any other. That is the most erroneous possible use of the word. An instinct is eminently something which cannot be "acquired"; it is native if anything is native; as native as the nose or the backbone. Instincts may be developed or repressed; it is the great mark of man that in him they may even be transmuted—but acquired never.

When we come to examine the laws of activity we find that, on the application of certain kinds of stimulus, there are certain very definite responses, and these we call instinctive. If the arm or the leg of a sleeper be stroked or touched, or a cold breath of air blows thereon, it will be withdrawn, and such withdrawal is what we call a reflex action. Now, an instinctive action, as Herbert Spencer saw long ago, is a "complex reflex action." It differs from a simple reflex, a mere twitch, such as winking, but it is a complicated, and possibly prolonged, action, which is, at bottom, of the nature of a reflex. One may instance the instinct of flight, which is correlated with fear. In crossing the street we hear "toot, toot," and we run. We do not ratiocinate, we run. All the primary instincts of mankind act similarly. Take, for contrast, the instinct of curiosity. Consider a child watching a mechanical toy; the impulse of this instinct of curiosity is such that he goes to the thing and examines it. By means of the transmutation, which it is the prerogative of man to effect, this instinct may work out into a lifetime devoted to the study of Nature. There is an unbroken sequence from the interest in the unknown which we see in a kitten or a child up to that which triumphs in a Newton or a Darwin.

Thus we begin to learn that human nature is largely a collection of instincts, more or less correlated, and that at bottom we act on our instincts—in accordance with certain innate predilections, likings, and dislikings with which we were born, and which we have inherited from our ancestors. Indissolubly associated therewith is what we call emotion. For instance, in the exercise of the instinct of curiosity we feel a certain emotion, which we call wonder. There is an ignoble wonder and there is a noble wonder; but whether it be an astronomer watching the stars, or the crowd at a cinematograph show, there exists an association between the emotion of wonder and the instinct of curiosity. Dr. McDougall, of Oxford, elaborated some few years ago, and has now established, an extremely important theory of the relation between instinct and emotion. He has shown that our emotions are correlated with our instincts; that the emotion is the inward or subjective side of the working of the instinct. Thus an instinct is more than a "complex reflex action"; it is more than merely that, on hearing something, or seeing something, certain muscles are thrown into action, because along with the action there is emotion, and this is a natural and necessary correlation. We should do well to carry about with us, as part of our mental furniture, this idea of the correlation between instinct and emotion.

Now, if it be true that man is not primarily a rational animal, if he be rather, au fond, a bundle, an assemblage, an organism of instincts, it behoves us to recognize in ourselves and in others the primary instincts, because from them flows all that goes to make up human nature, whether it be good or evil. Amongst these, certainly, is the parental instinct.

Let us first consider its development in the individual, for this bears on the question when to begin education for motherhood. We find it very early indeed. It is commonly asserted that the doll instinct is the precursor, the infantile and childish form, of the parental instinct. Some psychologists, as we have already noted, assure us that this is wrong, that a small child will be just as content to play with anything else as with a doll; that the child gets fond of its possession, and that what we are really witnessing is the instinct of acquisitiveness. The rest may reason and welcome, but those who are fathers know. We have only to watch a child to learn that it very soon differentiates its doll, or rather, the shapeless mass it calls its doll, from other things. Try with your own children and see if you can get them to like anything else as well as they like a doll. They will not. There are few settled questions as yet in psychology, but we may certainly be sure that the parental instinct and its associated emotion may be unmistakably displayed as the master-passion in a child who is not yet two years old. In a case where the possibility of imitation was excluded I have seen a little girl adore a small baby, stroke its hands, whisper quasi-maternal sweet nothings to it—"mother it," in short—as plainly as I have seen the sun at noon; and there is no reason to suppose that this deeply impressive spectacle was exceptional.

The parental instinct is connected subtly with the racial instinct; and it is undisputed that, except in utterly degraded persons, the object of the feelings which are associated with the racial instinct becomes the object of the feelings which are associated with the parental instinct. The object of the emotion of sex becomes also the object of tender emotion. Thus "love," in its lower sense, becomes exalted by Love in the noble sense.

There is also in us an instinct of pugnacity, which especially appears when the working of any other instinct is thwarted. We know that the parental instinct when thwarted, as in the tigress robbed of her whelps, shows itself in pugnacity—even in the female, which commonly has no pugnacity; and in the emotion of anger. It is a reasonable supposition that the fine anger, the passion for justice, the passion against, say, slavery or cruelty to children—that these indignations which move the world are at bottom traceable to the workings of the outraged parental instinct. When we have tender emotion towards a child, or towards an animal, whatever it be, this is really the subjective side of the working of the parental instinct. Now, tender emotion is what has made and makes everything that is good in the individual, and in human society. It is the basis of all morality—all morality that is real morality—everything that permits us to hold up our heads at all, or to hope for the future of the race. That is why the study of the parental instinct, its correlate or source, is as important and serious as any that can be imagined.

Let us begin by a quotation from Dr. McDougall, author of the best and most searching account of this instinct yet written:—

Dr. McDougall goes on to show how from this emotion and its impulse to cherish and protect spring generosity, gratitude, love, true benevolence, and altruistic conduct of every kind; in it they have their main and absolutely essential root without which they would not be. He argues that the intimate alliance between tender emotion and anger is of great importance for the social life of man, for "the anger invoked in this way is the germ of all moral indignation, and on moral indignation justice and the greater part of public law are in the main founded."[11]

The reader may be earnestly counselled to acquaint himself with Dr. McDougall's book, which, in the judgment of those best qualified, definitely advances the science of psychology in its deepest and most important aspects.

The Transmutation of Instinct.—The last thing here meant by the transmutation of instinct is that by any political alchemy it is possible—to quote Herbert Spencer's celebrated aphorism—to get golden conduct out of leaden instincts. But it is the mark of man, the intelligent being, that in him the instincts are plastic, and even capable of amazing transmutations. In the lower animals there is instinct, but that instinct is an almost completely fixed, rigid, and final thing. In ourselves there is a limitless capacity for the development, the humanization of instinct along many lines, as when the primitive infantile curiosity works out into the speculations of a thinker. In other words, we are educable, the lower animals are not, or only within very narrow limits.

Yet in one respect the lower animals have the advantage over us. Their instincts are often perfect. We cannot teach a cat anything about how to look after a kitten; but parallel instincts amongst ourselves, though not less numerous or potent, are not perfected, not sharp-cut. In the cat there is no need for education; in woman there is eminent need for it. Indeed it is the lack of education that is largely responsible for our large infant mortality; not that woman is inferior to the cat, but that, being not instinctive but intelligent, she requires education in motherhood.

Human instincts in general are capable of modification; sometimes they may take bizarre forms, and so we find that there are people without children of their own—more commonly women—who will have twenty cats in the house and look after them, or who will devote their whole lives to the cause of the rat or the rabbit, or whatever it may be, while the children of men are dying around them. These things are indications of the parental instinct centred on unworthy objects. It is a common thing to laugh at these aberrations—thoughtlessly, may we not say? While orphans are to be found, we should do better if we try to bring together the woman who needs to "mother" and the child who needs to be "mothered."

Conduct is at least three-fourths of life, and the great business of education is the direction of conduct. We have seen how modern psychology illuminates what has been so long dark, by directing us to our instincts as the sources of our needs, and by showing us that it is the possibility of the education of instinct which essentially distinguishes us from the lower animals.

We must therefore distinguish between education for motherhood and education or instruction in motherhood. It is very important that a woman should know the elements of infant feeding, but it is more important that, in the first place, her whole life before she becomes a mother—nay, even before she chooses her child's father—shall centre in the education of her instincts for motherhood. Finding good evidence, as we do, of the maternal instinct at a very early age, and recognizing its importance in conduct and in the formation of ideals long before the marriage age, we are justified in discussing the maternal instinct here instead of postponing it, as some might argue, until after we have discussed marriage. There is nothing which I wish to assert more strongly than that we are radically wrong in this postponement, which is indeed our customary practice. Partly because we are blind, partly because of our most imprudent prudery, we ignore and pervert the due sequence of development, but here I deliberately prefer to follow the indications of nature, and to discuss the maternal instinct now because, in the matter of the education of girls, this is precisely the most important subject that can be named.

Let us now note some popular misconceptions which cumber our minds and often interfere with the work of the reformer.

To begin with what is perhaps the oldest of these, though indeed scarcely entitled to the appellation of popular, let us assure ourselves once and for all that we are talking about a fact natural, innate, not acquired. The modern criticism of ancient notions of human nature, such as those expressed in the theologians' conception of "conscience," has inclined some to the view that our best feelings are indeed not at all innate. No one can for a moment analyze conscience without observing the immense disparity between the facts and the theologians' theory. And thus we are apt to fall into the opposite error of supposing that our impulses towards good action are entirely the products of education, training, public opinion, and so forth. Let the reader refer, for instance, to such a celebrated work as John Stuart Mill's "Utilitarianism," and it will be seen how wide of the mark it was possible for even a great thinker to go, when his ideas of mind were unguided by the light of evolution. Even in the greatest writer of that time not a syllable do we find as to the parental instinct. "As is my own belief," says Mill, "the moral feelings are not innate but acquired." Yet we have seen convincing evidence which teaches us that the moral feelings spring essentially from the root of the parental instinct, without which mankind could not continue for another generation, and than which there is nothing more fundamental and essential in any type of human nature that can persist.

The importance of noting this can be clearly stated. We are here dealing with something which is not for us to implant, but which is already part of the plant, so to speak, and which it is for us to tend. Like other innate features of mankind, its transmission from generation to generation is notably independent of the effects of education, the effects of use and disuse. This is a difficult thing of which to persuade people, but it is the fact. Education, environment, training, opportunity, habit, public opinion, social prejudice—all these and such other influences may and do affect the maternal instinct in the individual for good or for evil. No fact is more certain or important, and that is precisely why we must study this instinct. But the effect upon the individual does not involve any effect upon the native constitution of the individual's children. From age to age the general facts and features of the human backbone persist. We do not expect to find notable differences between the generations in such a radical feature of our constitution, no matter what particular habits of posture, play, and the like we adopt. The maternal instinct is scarcely less fundamental; it is certainly no whit less essential for the species. It is the very backbone of our psychological constitution. Thus it is nonsense to assert that, for instance, women are becoming less motherly, if by this is meant that the maternal instinct is failing. That bad education may affect it for evil no one can question, but we must distinguish between nature and nurture. We may be perfectly confident that so far as the natural material of girl-childhood and girlhood is concerned, there is no falling off; there will not, for there cannot, be any falling off either in the quality or in the quantity of the maternal instinct. On the contrary, it can, and will later be shown that through the action of heredity this instinct will be strengthened in the future, just in so far as motherhood becomes more and more a special privilege of those women in whom this instinct is strong, and who become mothers for the only good reason—that they love to have children of their own.

I protest, then, against many critics, especially those who used to raise their now silent voices in opposition to the beginnings of the infant mortality campaign a few years ago, that we who criticize modern motherhood and find in its defects the causes of many and great evils, as we do, are asserting nothing whatever against the women of this day as compared with the women of former days, so far as their natural constitution is concerned; and if we criticize the results of bad education, that is mainly criticism of the blindness, the stupidity, and the carelessness of men, who are responsible for the parodies of education and the misdirection of ideals which have so grossly afflicted, and still afflict, childhood and girlhood in all civilized communities.

Yet, again, there is another misconception of the maternal instinct as it exists in our own species, which is still more serious in its results. The argument is that, not only does the maternal instinct exist, but it is a sure guide to its possessor, who therefore requires no instruction—least of all at the hands of men. A woman being a woman knows all about babies, a man being a man knows nothing. Against this error the present writer has endeavoured to inveigh for many years past, and it is always retorted that insistence upon the ignorance of mothers is a very unwarrantable piece of discourtesy. It is nothing of the sort. Native ignorance is the mark of intelligence. It is just because instinct in us has not the perfection of detail which it has in, say, the insects, that it is capable of that limitless modification which shows itself in educated intelligence, and all that educated intelligence has achieved and will yet achieve. It may be permitted to quote from a former statement of this point:—[12]

"The mother has only the maternal instinct in its essence. That could not be permitted to lapse by natural selection, since humanity could never have been evolved at all if women did not love babies. But of all details she is bereft. She has instead an immeasurably greater thing, intelligence, but whilst intelligence can learn everything it has everything to learn. Subhuman instinct can learn nothing, but is perfect from the first within its impassable limits. It is this lapse of instinctive aptitude that constitutes the cardinal difficulty against which we are assembled. The mother cat not merely has a far less helpless young creature to succour, but she has a far superior inherent or instinctive equipment; she knows the best food for her kitten, she does not give it 'the same as we had ourselves'—as the human mother tells the coroner—but her own breast invariably. None of us can teach her anything as to washing her kitten, or keeping it warm. She can even play with it and so educate it, in so far as it needs education. There are mothers in all classes of the community who should be ashamed to look a tabby cat in the face."

The human mother has instinctive love and the uninstructed intelligence which is the form, at once weak and incalculably strong, that instinct so largely assumes in mankind. This cardinal distinction between the human and all sub-human mothers is habitually ignored, it being assumed that the mother, as a mother, knows what is best for her child. But experience concurs with comparative psychology in showing that the human mother, just because she is human, intelligent, which means more than instinctive, does not know. This is the theory upon which all our practice is to be based, and upon which the need for it mainly depends. We must never forget the cardinal peculiarity of human motherhood, its absolute dependence upon education, needless for the cat, needed by the human mother in every particular, small and great, since she relies upon intelligence alone, which is only a potentiality and a possibility until it be educated. Educate it, and the product transcends the cat, and not only the cat, but all other living things. As Coleridge said—

"A mother is a mother still,
The holiest thing alive."

Perhaps the foregoing will make it clear that to insist upon the natural ignorance of the human mother and upon the necessity for adding instruction to the maternal instinct, and even to make comparisons with the cat (which are, in point of fact, quite worth making, even though some women resent them) is in no way to depreciate or decry womanhood, but simply to demonstrate that it is human and not animal, suffering from the disabilities or necessities which are involved in the possession of the limitless possibilities of mankind.

What, then, is it in our power to do; and how are we to do it? It may be argued that if the maternal instinct is a thing which cannot be made or acquired, our study of it has little relation to practice. But indeed it is eminently practical.

For, in the first place, this priceless possession, this parental instinct and tenderness, is inheritable. We know by observation amongst ourselves that hardness and tenderness are to be found running through families—are things which are transmissible. Let us, then, make parenthood the most responsible, the most deliberate, the most self-conscious thing in life, so that there shall be children born to those who love children, and only to those who love children, to those who have the parental instinct naturally strong, and who will, on the average, transmit a high measure of it to their offspring. In a generation bred on these principles—a generation consisting only of babies who were loved before they were born—there would be a proportion of sympathy, of tender feeling, and of all those great, abstract, world-creating passions which are evolved from the tender emotion, such as no age hitherto has seen.

It was necessary to insert this eugenic paragraph because it expresses the central principle of all real reform, as fundamental and all-important as it is unknown to all political parties, and I fear to nearly all philanthropists as well. But, for the present, our immediate concern is the application, if such be possible, of our knowledge of the parental instinct to the education of girls. Being indeed an instinct it can be neither made nor acquired, but, like every other factor of humanity that is given by inheritance, it depends upon the conditions in which it finds itself. Education being the provision of an environment, there is no higher task for the educator than to provide the right environment for the maternal instinct in adolescence. We are to look upon it as at once delicate and ineradicable. These are adjectives which may seem incompatible, yet they may both be verified. Any one will testify that, in a given environment, say that of high school or university or that of the worst types of what is called society, the maternal instinct may then and there, and for that period, become a nonentity in many a girl. Hence we are entitled to say that it is delicate; much more delicate, for instance, than what we have agreed to call the racial instinct, which is far more imperious and by no means so easily to be suppressed.

But, on the other hand, just because this is an instinct, part of the fundamental constitution, and not a something planted from without, it is ineradicable. I doubt whether even in the most abandoned female drunkard it would not be possible to find, when the right environment was provided, that the maternal instinct was still undestroyed. One is, of course, not speaking of that rare and aberrant variety of women in whom the instinct is naturally weak—naturally weak as distinguished from the atrophy induced by improper nurture.

Our business, then, having recognized, so to speak, the natural history of this instinct, and further, having come to realize its stupendous importance for the individual and the race, is to tend it assiduously as the very highest and most precious thing in the girls for whom we care. As educators we must seek to provide the environment in which this instinct can flourish. It is a good thing to be an elder sister, not merely because the girl has opportunities of learning the ways of babies and the details of their needs, but for a far deeper reason. Babies do have very detailed and urgent needs, but these can be learnt without much difficulty, and, if necessary, at very short notice. More important is it for the whole development of the character and for the making of the worthiest womanhood that an elder sister is provided with an environment in which her maternal instinct can grow and grow in grace.

Much might be said on this head as to some of our present educational practices. The kind of educationist with whom no one would trust a poodle for half an hour may and does constantly assume, on a scale involving millions of children, from year to year, that all is well if the girl be taken from home and put into a school and made to learn by heart, or at any rate by rote, the rubbish with which our youth is fed even yet in the great name of education: though perchance whilst she is thus being injured in body and mind and character, she might at home be playing the little mother, helping to make the home a home, serving the highest interests of her parents, her younger brothers and sisters and herself at the same time—not to mention the unborn. Such a protest as this, however, will be little heeded. There is no political party which cares about education or even wants to know in what it consists. The most persistent and clever and resourceful of those parties—of which, I fear, the Fabian Society is far too good to be representative—only half believes in the family, and is daily, and ever with more lamentable success, seeking to substitute for the home some collective device or other precisely as rational as that scheme of Plato's whereby the babies were to be shuffled so that no mother should recognize her own baby, while the fathers, need it be said, were to be as gloriously irresponsible as under the schemes for the endowment of motherhood. "Socialism intervenes between the children and the parents.... Socialism in fact is the State family. The old family of the private individual must vanish before it, just as the old waterworks of private enterprise, or the old gas company. They are incompatible with it." Thus Mr. H. G. Wells.

Whilst this sort of thing passes for thinking, it is a task that has little promise in it to demand a return to the study of human nature, and insist that only by obeying it can we command it, as Bacon said of Nature at large. Meanwhile the madness proceeds apace; nursery-schools, wretched parody of the nursery, are advocated at length in even Fabian tracts, and the writer who suggests that an elder sister may be receiving the highest kind of education in staying at home and helping her mother, would sound almost to himself like an echo from the dead past did he not know that neither a Plato nor a million tons of moderns can walk through human nature or any other fact as if it were not there.

Whatever be our duty to the girl of the working-classes, no man can deny the importance of performing it aright. She will become the wife of the working-man. From her thus flows most of the birth-rate. If our education of her is wrong, it is a very great wrong for millions of individuals and for the whole of society. But let us look at the case of her more fortunate sister.

The girl of the more fortunate classes is certain to be well cared for in the matter of air and food and light and exercise. We have already seen how this matter of exercise requires to be qualified and determined as for motherhood—that is, unless we desire most suicidally to educate all the most promising stocks of the nation out of existence. But now what do we owe to her in the matter of providing the right kind of intellectual, moral, spiritual, psychical environment? It is a pity to flounder with so many adjectives, but nearly all the available ones are forsworn and fail to express my meaning. Let us, however, speak of the spiritual environment, seeking to free that word from all its lamentable associations of superstition and cant, and to associate it rather with a humanized kind of religion that deals with humanity as made by, living upon, and destined for, this earth, whatever unseen worlds there may or may not be to conquer.

It is our business, then, to provide the spiritual environment in which the maternal instinct is favoured and seen to be supremely honourable. If in the "best" girls' schools ideas of marriage and babies are ridiculed, the sooner these schools be rubbed down again into the soil, the better. There is no need to substitute one form of cant for another, but it is possible—possible even though the head-mistress should be a spinster, for whom physical motherhood has not been and never will be—to incorporate in the very spirit of the school, as part of its public opinion, no less potent though its power be not consciously felt, the ideals of real and complete womanhood, which mean nothing less than the consecration of the individual to the future, and the belief that such consecration serves not only the future but also the highest satisfaction of her best self.

If it were our present task to define and specify the details of a school in which girls should be educated for womanhood, for motherhood, and the future, it would not be difficult, I think, to show how the services of painting and sculpture, of poetry and prose, should be enlisted. A word or two of outline may be permitted.

There is, for instance, a noble Madonna of Botticelli which is supremely great, not because of the skill of the painter's hand, nor yet the delicacy of his eye, but because of the spirit which they express. Botticelli speaks across the centuries, and is none other than an earlier voice uttering the words of Coleridge, teaching that a mother is the holiest thing alive. The master may or may not have perceived that the Madonna was a symbol; that what he believed of one holy mother was worth believing just in so far as it serves to make all motherhood holy and all men servants thereof. The painter can scarcely have looked at his model and appreciated her fitness for his purpose without realizing that he was concerned with depicting a truth not local and unique, but universal and commonplace. Whether or not the painter saw this, we have no excuse for not seeing it. Copies of such a painting as this should be found in every girls' school throughout the world.

Girls learn drawing and painting at school, and these are amongst the numerous subjects on which the present writer is entitled to no technical or critical opinion. But he sometimes supposes that a painting is not necessarily the worse because it represents a noble thing, and that it may even be a worthier human occupation to portray the visage of a living man or woman than the play of light upon a dead wall or a dead partridge. It might even be argued by the wholly inexpert that if the business of art is with beauty, the art is higher, other things being equal, in proportion as the beauty it portrays is of a higher order. Thus in the painting of women, the ignorant commentator sometimes asks himself in what supreme sense it was worth while for an artist to expend his powers upon the portrait of some society fool who could pay him twelve hundred pounds therefor; or in what supreme sense a painter can be called an artist who prefers such a task, and the flesh-pots, to the portrayal of womanhood at its highest. There are attributes of womanhood which directly serve human life, present and to come—attributes of vitality and faithfulness, attributes of body and bosom, of mind and of feeling, which it is within the power of the great artist to portray; and it is in worthily portraying the greatest things, and in this alone, that he transcends the status of the decorator.

It is worth while also to refer here to sculpture; something can be taught by its means. The Venus of Milo is not only a great work of art; it is also a representation of the physiological ideal. Its model was a woman eminently capable of motherhood. The corset is beyond question undesirable from every point of view, and it may be of service by means of such a statue as this to teach the girl's eye what are the right proportions of the body. She is constantly being faced with gross and preposterous perversions of the female figure as they are to be seen in the fashion plates of every feminine journal. It is as well that she should have opportunities of occasionally seeing something better.

A note upon the corset may not be out of place here. We know that its use is of no small antiquity. We have lately come to learn that civilization stepped across to Europe from Asia, using Crete as a stepping-stone; and in frescoes found in the palace of Minos, at Knossos, by Dr. Arthur Evans, we find that the corset was employed to distort the female figure nearly four thousand years ago, as it is to-day. There must be some clue deep in human nature to the persistence of a custom which is in itself so absurd. Those who have studied the work of such writers as Westermarck, and who cannot but agree that on the whole he is right in the contention that each sex desires to accentuate the features of its sex, will be prepared to accept Dr. Havelock Ellis's interpretation of the corset. By constricting the waist it accentuates the salience of the bosom and hips. This may simply be an expression of the desire to emphasize sex, but it may with still more insight be looked upon, as the latter writer has suggested, as the insertion of a claim to capacity for motherhood. This claim is of course unconscious, but Nature does not always make us aware of the purposes which she exercises through us. Now, though the corset serves to draw attention to certain factors of motherhood, in point of fact it is injurious to that end, and is on that highest of all grounds to be condemned. I return to the point that possibly the direct and formal condemnation of the corset may be in some cases less effective than the method, which must have some value for every girl, of placing before her eyes representations of the female figure, showing beauty and capacity for motherhood as completely fused because they are indeed one. Constrain the girl to admit that that is as beautiful as can be, and then ask her what she thinks the corset applied to such a figure could possibly accomplish.

Surely the same principle applies to what the girl reads. Some of us become more and more convinced that youth, being naturally more intelligent than maturity, prefers and requires more subtlety in its teaching. In addressing a meeting of men, say upon politics, a speaker's first business is to be crude. He has no chance whatever unless he is direct, unqualified, allowing nothing at all for any kind of intelligence or self-constructive faculty in the minds of his hearers. Let any one recall the catchwords, styled watchwords, of politics during the last ten or twenty years, and he will see how men are to be convinced.

But it is all very well to treat men as fools, provided that you do not say so—the case is different with young people, and certainly not less with girls than with boys. Mr. Kipling, in one of those earlier moments of insight that sometimes almost persuade us to pardon the brutality which year by year becomes more than ever the dominant note of his teaching, once told us of the discomfiture of a member of Parliament, or person of that kind, who went to a boys' school to lecture about Patriotism, and who unfurled a Union Jack amid the dead silence of the disgusted boys. He forgot that, for once, he was speaking to an intelligent audience, which demands something a little less crude than the kind of thing which wins elections and makes and unmakes governments and policies.

There is certainly a lesson here for those who are entrusted with the supreme responsibility, so immeasurably more political than politics, of forming the girl's mind for her future destiny. Suggestion is one of the most powerful things in the world, but we must not forget that inverted form of it which has been called contra-suggestion. We all know how the first shoots of religion are destroyed on all sides in young minds by contra-suggestion. Crude, ill-timed, unsympathetic, excessive, religious teaching and religious exercises achieve, as scarcely anything else could, exactly the opposite of that which they seek to attain. Thus it is not here proposed that we should take any course at home or at school which should have the result of making motherhood as nauseous to the girl's mind through contra-suggestion, as it easily could be made if we did not set to work upon judicious lines.

If we are in any measure to gain, by means of books, our end of forming right ideals in the girl's mind, I am certain that we must not expect to accomplish much with the help of any but very great writers. We may very well doubt the substantial value for the purpose of anything written for the purpose. Such books may be of value for the teacher; they may possibly be of value in disposing of curiosity that has become overweening or even morbid, but their value as preachments I much question. The kind of writing upon which the young girl's mind will be nourished in years to come is best represented by the lecture on "Queens' Gardens" in Ruskin's "Sesame and Lilies," though in that magnificent and immortal piece of literature there is nowhere any direct allusion to motherhood as the natural ideal for girlhood. Yet if only one girl in a hundred who read that lecture can be persuaded, in the beautiful phrase to be found there, that she was "born to be love visible," how excellent is the work that we shall have accomplished! A chapter might well be devoted entirely to the teaching of Wordsworth regarding womanhood. We need scarcely remind ourselves that this great poet owed an immeasurable debt to his sister, and in lesser, though very substantial, degree to his wife and daughters. He has left an abundance of poetry which testifies directly and indirectly to these influences. This poetry is not only utterly lovely as poetry; at once sane and passionate, steadying and thrilling, but it is also not to be surpassed, I cannot but believe, as a means for rightly forming the ideals of girlhood. Every year sees an inundation of new collections of poetry. The anthologist might do worse than collect from Wordsworth a small, but precious and quintessential volume under some such title as "Wordsworth and Womanhood." One would do it oneself but that literary people of a certain school regard it as an impertinence that any one who believes in knowledge should intrude into their sphere. Wordsworth, it is true, said that "poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science." But most literary people are so busy writing that they have no time to read, and they forget these sayings of the immortal dead. Yet that is just a saying which directly bears upon the present contention. We must be very careful lest we insult and outrage girlhood with our physiology, not that physiology is either insolent or outrageous, but that girlhood is girlhood. It is the "breath and finer spirit" of our knowledge of sex and parenthood that we must seek to impart to her. Poetry is its vehicle, and the time will come when we shall consciously use it for that great purpose.

But we cannot expect the adolescent girl to be content even with Ruskin and Wordsworth. She must, of course, have fiction, and under this heading there is more or less accessible to her every possibility in the gamut of morality, from the teaching of such a book as "Richard Feverel" down to the excrement and sewage that defile the railway book-stalls to-day under the guise of "bold, reverent, and fearless handling of the great sex problems." The present writer is one of those old-fashioned enough to believe that it matters a great deal what young people read. We are all hygienists nowadays, and very particular as to what enters our children's mouths. But what is the value of these precautions if we relax our care as to what enters their minds?

It is my misfortune to be scarcely acquainted at all with fiction, and I can presume to offer no detailed guidance in this matter. The name of Mr. Eden Phillpotts must certainly be mentioned as foremost among those living writers who care for these things. In the Eugenics Education Society it was at one time hoped to see the formation of a branch of fiction in the library which might form the nucleus of a catalogue, well worth disseminating if only it could be compiled, of fiction worthy the consumption of girlhood. Perhaps it would hardly be necessary for the present writer to protest that the didactic, the unnaturally good, the well-meaning, the entirely amateur types of fiction, including those which ignore the facts of human nature, and, above all, those which decry instead of seeking to deify the natural, would find no place in this catalogue. It is possible, though I much doubt it, that there may be many books unknown to me of the order and quality of "Richard Feverel." At any rate, that represents in its perfection—save, perhaps, for the unnecessary tragedy of its close, which the illustrious author himself in conversation did not find it quite possible to defend—the type of novel whose teaching the Eugenist and the Maternalist must recommend for the nourishment of youth of both sexes.

As has been already hinted, discourses on how to wash a baby are less in place here; and in the following chapter the argument will be set forth in detail that the sequence of the common schemes for the education of girlhood and womanhood is, in one essential respect, logically and practically erroneous.