Baby’s rights are fundamental. They are:

To be wanted.

To be loved before birth as well as after birth.

To be given a body untainted by any heritable disease, uncontaminated by any of the racial poisons.

To be fed on the food that nature supplies, or, if that fails, the very nearest substitute that can be discovered.

To have fresh air to breathe; to play in the sunshine with his limbs free in the air; to crawl about on sweet clean grass.

When he is good, to do what baby wants to do and not what his parents want; for instance, to sleep most of his time, not to sit up and crow in response to having his cheeks pinched or his sides tickled.

When he is naughty, to do what his parents want and not what he wants: to be made to understand the “law of the jungle.” From his earliest days he must be disciplined in relation to the great physical facts of existence, to which he will always hereafter have to bow. The sooner he comprehends this, the better for his future.

Most young mothers, even those who have had the advantage of highly trained maternity nurses to assist them at first, later require authoritative advice about how to treat the baby for whom they have given so much, and to whom they wish to give every possible advantage. Many books give advice to the young mother and to these she may turn. I do not wish to duplicate what they say, but advise every one who has an infant, even if they think they know all about the best method of bringing it up, to possess a copy of Dr. Truby King’s Baby and How to Rear It for reference. It is the most practical, sensible and best illustrated book of its kind.

There is, therefore, on the subject of baby’s material rights not very much more that I need to say, but there is one elementary right very generally overlooked, and that is the right to love in anticipation.

Baby’s right to be wanted is an individual right which is of racial importance. No human being should be brought into the world unless his parents desire to take on the responsibility of that new life which must, for so long, be dependent upon them.

Far too many of the present inhabitants of this earth who are not wanted because of their inferiority, were children who came to reluctant, perhaps horror-stricken, mothers. To this fact, I trace very largely the mental and physical aberrations which are to-day so prevalent; to this also I trace the bitterness, the unrest, the spirit of strife and malignity which seem to be without precedent in the world at present [see also The Control of Parenthood, final section, and, for the remedy, my book, Wise Parenthood, both published by Putnam].

The warped and destructive impulse of revolution which is sweeping over so many people at present must have its roots in some deep wrong.

Revolution is not a natural activity for human beings. Though the revolutionary impulse has swept through sections of humanity many times in its history, it is essentially unnatural, an indication of warping and poisoning, and a cause of further and perhaps irreparable damage.

Happy people do not indulge in revolution. Happy people with a deep sense of underlying contentment and satisfaction in life may yet strive ardently to improve and beautify everything round them. They strive in the same direction as the main current of life—that is the growth and unfolding of ever increasing beauty. The revolutionaries—bitter, soured and profoundly unhappy—pit their strength against the normal stream of life and destroy, break down and rob. Too long humanity has had to endure such outbreaks owing to its general blindness and lack of understanding of their causes.

Until the scientific spirit of profound inquiry into fundamental causes becomes general even in a small section of the community, superficial and apparently obvious explanations are accepted to account for results which really arise from profound and secret springs.

The “divine discontent” which has impelled humanity forward along the path of constructive progress is a very different thing from the bitter discontent which leads to revolutionary and destructive outbursts. The village blacksmith of the well-known song, using his healthy muscles on hard, useful work which gives him a deep physical satisfaction, may feel the former and help forward the stream of progress in his village.

The aim of reformers to-day should be to provide for every one neither ease nor comfort, nor high wages nor short hours, but the deeper necessities of a full and contented life, bodies able to respond with satisfaction to the strain of hard work performed under conditions which satisfy the mind in the most fundamental way of all—the deep, sub-conscious satisfaction which is given by the sweet smell of earth, by fresh air and sunshine, and green things around one.

We draw from all these things some subtle ingredient without which our natures are weakened so that a further strain sends them awry. To-day we are so deeply involved with the hydra-headed monster of the revolutionary spirit that there does not seem time to deal with it radically, to attempt to understand it, and consequently to conquer it for ever. Even now, when for the first time humanity is on a large scale beginning to tackle fundamental problems, I have seen no indication that the source of revolution is being sought for in the right place.

What is the source of revolution?

The revolutionaries through the ages, feeling themselves jar with their surroundings, have been ensnared by the nearest obvious things, the happier surrounding of others. These they have endeavoured to snatch at and destroy, thinking thereby to improve their own and their comrades’ lot. Their deductions, though profoundly false, have appeared even obviously right to many.

External grievances are what the revolutionary is out to avenge: external benefits are what he is out to gain. Generally this is expressed in terms of higher wages, a share, or all, of the capital of those supposed to be better off, or the material possessions of others. These are the things that nearly all strikers and revolutionaries are upsetting the world to get, thinking—perhaps sincerely—that these things will give them the happiness for which, consciously or unconsciously, they yearn. The truth is, however, that it is a much more intimate thing than money or possessions which they need. They need new bodies and new hearts.

Most of the revolutionaries I have met are people who have been warped or stunted in their own personal growth. One sees upon their minds or bodies the marks and scars of dwarfing, stunting or lack of balance. They have known wretchedness both in themselves and in their families far more intimate and penetrating than that of mere poverty.

That, they may answer, is an external grievance which has been imposed upon them by society. In effect they say: “Society has starved us, given us bad conditions.” Thus they foster a grievance against “society” in their minds. One bitter leader said to me:—

But it was not society that put fourteen children into that cottage; it was the mother herself. Her own ignorance, helpless ignorance perhaps, was the source of her children’s misery. The most for which society can be blamed concerning that family is in tolerating such a plague-spot of ignorance in its midst. Nor is this pestilential ignorance by any means only confined to the financially poor.

This country, and nearly all the world, has innumerable homes in which the seed of revolution is sown in myriads of minds from the moment they are conceived. Revolted, horror-stricken mothers bear children whose coming birth they fear.

A starved, stunted outlook is stamped upon their brains and bodies in the most intimate manner before they come into the world, so oriented towards it that they must run counter to the healthy, happy constructive stream of human life.

What wonder at the rotten conditions of our population when these are common experiences of the mothers of our race:—

Again:—

Again:—

Again:—

Need I go on?

There lies the real root of revolution.

The secret revolt and bitterness which permeates every fibre of the unwillingly pregnant and suffering mothers has been finding its expression in the lives and deeds of their children. We have been breeding revolutionaries through the ages and at an increasing rate since the crowding into cities began, and women were forced to bear children beyond their strength and desires in increasingly unnatural conditions.

Also since women have heard rumours that such enslaved motherhood is not necessary, that the wise know a way of keeping their motherhood voluntary, the revolt in the mother has become conscious with consequent injury to the child.

Increasingly, the first of baby’s rights is to be wanted.

Concerning baby’s right to be fed on the food that nature supplies, or if that fails on the very nearest substitute that can be discovered, there are to-day so many who urge that an infant shall be fed by its own mother, that it is perhaps needless to repeat arguments so impressive. Nevertheless, perhaps it is as well to remind young mothers of two or three of the most vital facts. The first is that no artificial substitute, however perfectly prepared and chemically analysed, can possibly give those very subtle constituents which are found in the mother’s own milk and which vary from individual to individual. These probably are in the nature of the vitamines now so well known in fresh food, but they are something more specifically individual than can be scientifically detected. The fresh milk of its own mother has a peculiar value to the child which is greater than that of any foster mother.

For this reason alone, were it the only one, every young mother should nurse her own baby if possible; but, on the other hand, to-day it not infrequently happens that the mother may have an apparent flow of milk, quite sufficient for the infant in quantity, but that milk may be devoid of the necessary supply of fat or sugars or some other ingredient for complete nutriment. When this is so, it is often wisest to allow the mother to nurse the child partly and to supplement its diet by other milk.

Various schools of doctors and maternity nurses have differed even on this matter, but it is quite obvious that if the actual food value of the mother’s milk is below a certain point then the added value of its individual vitamine-like qualities will not wholly compensate for the loss of actual nourishment.

Among baby’s rights, I should perhaps also make it clear that there is his right that he should not be used as a bulwark between his mother and another baby in a way which is sometimes recommended so that a mother may go on nursing her infant for a very long time, sometimes even into its second year, in the hope that this nursing may prevent her conceiving again. Such a course of action is very harmful both to the child and to her and should never be followed. Such a practice is, of course, much less common in this country (except among aliens) than it is abroad where I have seen healthy children of even three or four years of age nursing upon their mother’s knees.

In these days, perhaps it is hardly necessary to accentuate baby’s other rights since the century of the child dawned a generation ago. To-day it is perhaps almost more important to accentuate the rights of others who exist in the neighbourhood of a baby. But on the other hand if one looks penetratingly at the whole problem of character development, one sees that among baby’s rights is its right to be trained from the very first so that its life shall be as little hindered by friction as may be possible: that it should be taught the elementary rules of conduct and necessary conformity with the hard material facts of existence from the very first. A wise nurse’s or mother’s training from the earliest weeks of infancy may make or mar a future man’s or woman’s chance of getting on in the world and making a success of their lives, by making or marring the character, the capacity to obey, the formation of regular and hygienic habits and the realization of the physical facts of the world.

The ancient Greeks taught their youth to reverence that which was beneath them, that which was around them, and that which was above them. In my opinion this right of youth to be placed in its proper orientation in relation to the world has been neglected of late. We are suffering from the wayward revolt from an earlier and perhaps harsher type of mistake, that of too greatly controlling and thwarting the child’s impulses. We must maintain a just balance and return to the due mean in which the right of a child, not only to be well born but well trained, is universally recognized.

CHAPTER XVIII
The Weakest Link in the Human Chain

Proverbs innumerable and daily experience have familiarized every one with the idea that the citizen is moulded and his or her essential characteristics determined in childhood, and as a result of childhood’s training. The most profoundly operative of all his qualities is his potential sex attitude, because it is that which determines his experience of sex and marriage, which colours his thoughts towards women throughout his life, which inclines his mind nobly towards his own racial actions or which leaves him weak and frivolous in his attitude towards the greatest profundities of life.

Children, otherwise brought up with every care and forethought, surrounded by all that love and money can give them, are too generally left, without their mother’s guidance or their father’s wisdom, to discover the great facts of life partly by instinct and partly from the vulgar talk of servants or soiled children a little older than themselves. Worse even than this takes place, because most generally in this connection they not only do not hear the truth from their mother’s lips, but they learn from her their most influential and earliest lesson in lying.

The curious thing about the particularly pernicious form of lying which deals with racial things in the presence of childhood is that we have the habit of thinking it quite innocent. Indeed we have even acquired the habit of thinking it one of the charming form of lies; hence when we are in a reforming mood, seeking for the origins of the wrongs we are trying to put right, we pass these “charming” lies by, thinking them harmless.

Where did each one of us first learn to lie?

Nearly every one who is now grown up got his (or her) first lesson in lying at his mother’s knee. To the little child, in his narrow but ever widening world, the mother is the supreme ruler, the all-wise provider of food, clothes, pleasures and pains. The mother (the child instinctively feels) must be also the source of wisdom.

Question after question about himself and his surroundings springs up in the baby mind. Mother is asked them all, and for every one she has some sort of an answer. Then inevitably, at three or four, or five years old comes the question:—“Mother, where did you find me?”—“Mother, how was I born?”

Then comes the lie.

The child is told about the doctor bringing him in a bag—or a stork flying in through the window—or the accidental finding under the gooseberry bush.

All children delight in fairy tales, but instinctively they know very well the difference between a fairy tale which is recounted to them as a story in answer to their mood of “make-believe” and a fiction which is putting them off when they are seeking the truth.

If the mother who feels herself too ignorant or too self-conscious to answer the truth to the child’s questions takes him on her knee and deliberately tells him in a “make-believe” mood a fairy tale, the child will then not feel that the mother has lied. He will feel, however, that he must ask some one else for the truth.

But most mothers give the answer containing the fiction of the gooseberry bush, or whatever it may be, in a manner indicating that that is what the child must believe, and the child receives the information as a serious answer to his serious question. It is then a lie, and a pernicious lie.

Racial knowledge, instinct, whatever you like to call it, is subtler and stronger in baby minds than we dulled grown-ups are inclined to think. The youngest child has a half-consciousness that what its mother said in answer to this question was not true.

Nurse, or auntie, a friend’s governess, or any one else who seems wise and powerful, is asked the same question when mother is not there, and the chances are that if mother had given the stork version auntie gives the gooseberry bush or some other fiction which she particularly favours.

The baby ponders intermittently, inconsequently, perhaps at long intervals, perhaps after years, but ultimately it realizes that its mother lied to it.

In this way infinite injury has been done to the whole human stock, and more particularly women have suffered from the dishonesty and the inherent incapacity of our society to be frank and truthful about the most profound and the most terrible aspects of sex, namely, its diseases. A wife or a mother has the right to be told the truth.

Women, and particularly mothers, have been outrageously wronged by the deliberate lies and untruthful atmosphere about the greater problems of sex in which the learned have enshrouded them: but mothers have themselves given the first bent to the little sprouting twig of that tree of knowledge, and they have bent it away from the sunlight of truth and clean and happy understanding.

The mother’s excuse is, or would be if she felt herself in any way to blame (which, by the way, deplorably, she very seldom does) that these terrible mysteries of origin are not suitable for the little innocent child to ponder over. She thinks they would shock him. But here the mother is profoundly mistaken.

The age of innocence is the age when all knowledge is pure. At three, four, or five years old, everything is taken for granted—everything in the universe is equally a surprise, and is at the same time accepted without question as being in the natural course of events. If true answers were given to the tiny child’s questions, they would seem quite rational—not in the least more surprising than the fact that oak trees grow from acorns, or that the cook gets a jam tart out of a hot oven.

All the world’s events seem magic at that age, and if no exceptional mystery were made of the magic of his own advent, the child would feel it as natural as all the rest, and having asked the question and obtained satisfactory, simple unaccentuated answers, would let his little mind run on to the thousand other questions he wants to ask. The essential racial knowledge would slip naturally and sweetly into his mind mingled with a myriad other new impressions.

There is no self-consciousness, no personal shamefacedness, about a tiny child. It accepts the great truths of the universe in the grand manner.

If the mother has never failed her child, has always given it what she could of wisdom, she will retain his trust and his confidence. When he gets a little older she can teach him to go to no one else for talk about the intimacies of life, which the child is quick to realize are not discussed openly amongst strangers.

Then, later on, when personal consciousness and shyness begin, there need not be the acute constraint and tension of the shame-faced elder speaking to a mind awakening to itself. Deep in the child’s consciousness, deeper even than its conscious memory goes, the true big facts are planted.

To tell a child of twelve or fourteen the truth is, for most parents, an impossibly difficult matter. The reason for this is that it is then too late for essentials; only details are then suitable or necessary.

Little children spend much of their early time in exploring themselves and their immediate surroundings—all is mysterious, all at first unknown. Their own feet and hands, their powers of locomotion and of throwing some object to a distance, the curls of their own hair, the pain they encounter in their bodies when explorations bring them in contact with sharp angles: all are equally mysterious, together forming a wonder-world. And babies are very young indeed when they explore with all the rest of their bodies, the rudiments of those of their racial organs with which they can acquaint themselves. In my opinion, the attitude of a man or woman through life is largely determined by the attitude adopted by the mother towards the racial organs BEFORE the child was old enough consciously to remember any instruction that was imparted.

Advice is often given in these more enlightened days to instruct your boy or girl in his racial power or duties when he or she is ten or twelve years old. This to many seems very young, and they hesitate and defer it till they are older and “can understand better.” In my opinion, this is already eight or ten years too late.

The child’s first instruction in its attitude towards its sex organs, its first account of the generation of human beings, should be given when it is two or three years old; given with other instruction, of which it is still too young to comprehend more than part, but which it is nevertheless old enough to comprehend in part. Very simple instruction given reverently at suitable opportunities at that early age will impress itself upon the very texture of the child’s mind, before the time of actual memories, so that from the very first possible beginnings its tendencies are in the direction of truth and reverent understanding.

A child so tiny will usually not remember one word of what was said to it, but the effects on his outlook will be deep. For at that early age, children are meditatively absorbing and being impressed by the psychological states and feelings of their instructors and companions, and if, in these very earliest months, the mother or guardian makes the mistake of treating ribaldly the tiny organs or of speaking lightly in the child’s presence, or of directly lying to the child about these facts, that child receives a mental warp and injury which nothing can ever eradicate entirely, which may in later years through bitter and befouling experiences be lived down as an old scar that has healed, but which will have permanently injured it.

I hold this to be a profound truth, and one which it is urgent that humanity should realize. I trust that my view will establish itself on every hand. If that were my way, I could easily write a whole volume on this theme, and coin a polysyllabic terminology in which to mould and harden thought on the subject. But I prefer that a few simple words should slip like vital seed into the hearts of mothers, and that they may mould the race.

It is ignorance of this truth which has led to the dishonouring and befouling of pure and beautiful youth, which is the original source of the greater part of all the social troubles and the sex difficulties of adolescence.

The tiny child of two or three years old, just beginning to perceive and piece together the psychological impressions stamped upon it by its environment and the mind-states of those around it, is the weakest link in the chain of our social consciousness. Physically, the new born babe for the first few days of its life is the weakest link in the chain, the most liable physically to extinction, but spiritually, socially the link most liable to warping, even destruction, is the awakening mind, the still half-sleeping consciousness, of the child between two and three years old.

The mother or guardian then who desires her son or daughter to face the great facts of life beautifully and profoundly should begin from the first to mould that attitude in the child. It may appear to the unthinking like building castles in the sand even to hint at truths which it cannot comprehend to a child who remembers nothing of the words used in later years. This is not so. What the child absorbs is less the actual words than the tone of voice, the mode of expression that spiritually impresses itself upon its own little soul.

Then there comes a later stage for most civilized human beings, usually after they are three years old, when there arises the possibility of permanent consciousness through permanent and specific memory of things seen, done or heard. Most grown-ups of the present generation will have some vivid memory, dating back to when they were between three and four years old, when they received a strong mental impression that grown-ups were lying to them or that there was something funny or silly in questions which they asked. Perhaps they noticed that whilst Jack the Giant Killer was taken seriously, questions about where pussy got her kittens were laughed at. Almost each one of us who is to-day grown up then received some grievous injury. This time is of great importance in the psychology not only of the child, but of the whole adult race arising from the growing up of each child, for one’s earliest memories are few but very vivid. As things are to-day, generally between the ages of three and four or so, in the months which are likely to yield a lifelong memory, the spirit is wounded by the shock of a serious lie.

When as a mother or father you are with your children it is vital to be most careful to answer truly, and if possible beautifully, the questions which arise. No one can foresee which question and answer may make that terrible impression which lasts for a lifetime.

When your little son or daughter is about the age of three or four or five, the day will come when you are asked questions about the most fundamental facts in human life, and then the answers to these questions contain the probability of a lifelong memory. Answer with the truth.

Many parents are anxious to tell their children the great truths in a wise and beautiful manner. But few feel that they know how to do it, for it is a most difficult thing to know how to answer searching questions about profound subjects, and particularly about those which the community wrongly considers shameful. Each mother knows, or should know, the temperament and needs of her child, so that the adaptation of the advice I give should be varied to suit the individual child. In essence, however, children’s demands at an early age are remarkably similar, and the questions of children on birth and sex differ in form, though seldom in substance.

The following conversation between a mother and her little son indicates what seems to me the best way first to tell a child who has reached the age when he may have lasting memory of the facts that he is blindly seeking in his baby questions. It will not suffice to learn the answers off by heart; the baby will then soon confound his elders, but the substance of the conversation should prove useful.

The very first time the query comes: “Mother where did you get me?” the mother must not divert the child’s interest, or hesitate, but should be ready at once to answer:—

That may suffice for the time, because little children are very readily satisfied with one or two facts about any one subject, and the talk could easily be diverted. The little mind may brood over what was told, and some time later—perhaps a few days, perhaps even a few months or more—this question will come up again, possibly in a different form:—

The mother should give the day and say:—

Again the subject may perhaps drop, or it may be carried directly forward.

The child may be temporarily satisfied, or may continue at once:—

The mother should lay the child’s hand on her heart and let him feel it beating.

The child who has been brought up in a home of love and tenderness and beauty will find this a thrilling and beautiful thought, like a little boy whom I know personally, and to whom this fact was told in this way. Solemnly, and without a word, he went away from his mother into the middle of the room and stood deep in thought for several minutes. Then he turned, looked round, and rushed across the room, threw himself into his mother’s lap, his arms round her neck and cried: “Oh, Mummy, Mummy, then I was right inside you.”

For days afterwards he was filled with a rapturous joy, and at times used to leave his play and come to his mother and put his arms round her neck, saying: “Oh, Mummy, that is why I love you so.”

Whatever form the child’s feeling may take, the opportunity should not be allowed to pass without a little addition to the conversation, and the mother should say:—

Once may be sufficient for a child to be told the greater truths it desires to know, but it is seldom that the child will leave so wonderful a subject entirely alone after first learning of it, and many portions of the beautiful facts will have to be repeated in a variety of forms, or in just the same words, as are repeated again and again the beloved fairy tales. The child, however, will be quick to know the difference between this story and fairy tales, for children have an instinct for truth at a much earlier age than grown-ups generally remember.

A further series of questions will probably arise when the child is about twelve.

The essential difficulties of these later questions, and the shamefaced self-consciousness so usual between parent and child will never arise if from the first the deep truths have been known to the child.

The child so instructed is not supplied with all necessary facts, and instruction of a more specific and exact nature will have to be repeated at further intervals throughout its life, but on this foundation, further knowledge can be built without having to wipe out anything already implanted, without having to contradict earlier instruction, or to acknowledge the gravest error of having lied. Life teaches much to a quick child trained to observation, particularly in the country, where all children should spend much of their time. If the little one has been told what has been given in the previous pages it will have all the essential truths on to which it will fit in for itself the other data which daily life will bring it; thus it may garner a harvest of facts one by one.

Concerning the later instruction which will be necessary, the information can be given in many ways. Some advocate school instruction of children of twelve or more in the physiology of all the members of the body, so that the racial powers are treated in their proper place in conjunction with the digestive organs, brain, lungs, etc. Some parents prefer to give the instruction themselves, for none but they can know so well the individual needs of the child.

Much has already been written and is available in the voluminous literature about the presentation of the facts to be imparted at the various later ages, and almost every book advises comparisons with flowers. For the later ages of ten years and after, this is probably the best introduction for specific details, but for the first and earliest instruction of the baby mind, such direct simple answers as I have indicated are, I am sure, the best.

Children whose parents have treated them as I advise in this chapter are essentially safe whatever form later instruction may take. They will then have the vitality to survive lies, although ever to lie to them will be putting a cruel and useless strain on their recuperative powers. If the little child is started upon its life with a beautiful and true conception of its relation to its mother, and of man’s relation to woman, it will be unlikely indeed that it will grow up a hooligan who flouts his parents or a loose and lascivious destroyer of women.

CHAPTER XIX
The Cost of Coffins

Why do poor slum mothers buy more coffins than do the same number of rich women?

The incredulous may answer this question by asserting that they don’t, but as a matter of fact they do. The Registrar-General’s Report for 1911 shows that of every thousand births in the upper and middle classes, 76·4 babies die, while of a thousand births in the homes of unskilled workmen (this would be the class of the “poor” mothers) 152·5 babies die.

So that it is clear that if each member of this poorest class of mothers had exactly the same number of babies as each mother of the rich class, she would have to purchase about two coffins for every coffin bought by those whose babies are not so prone to die.

There is, however, another fact which completes the proof of my first sentence. The upper and middle classes do not have so many children per family as do the poorest class. To a thousand married people in the upper and middle classes there were born in 1911 119 babies, but to the poor mothers—the wives of the unskilled workmen—there were born 213. So that in addition to buying twice as many coffins per thousand children born, these poor mothers have nearly twice as many coffins again, owing to the fact that nearly twice as many children are born to them.

I wonder if poor women have ever asked themselves if they can afford coffins at this rate?

Of course the coffins of these poor little babies are very small, and do not require very much wood to make them. But let us think in what other ways they cost: To the mother they cost not only all the little the baby had eaten, and used in the way of clothes before its death, but all the wastage of her own vitality while she was bearing it; she could not work so well, at any rate towards the end of the time. Home duties had to be somewhat neglected; the older children had to go to school dirtier and less cared for; the husband had less comfort and fewer smiles; every one in the family was poorer, not only in material things and in the work that might make material things, but in happiness and buoyancy.

It needs no imagination to realize, when you have once grasped these facts, that poor people are much less able to spare the cost of a doomed baby than are the better class people. Then why do they so often indulge in this tragic luxury? Chiefly through lack of knowledge, through ignorance, particularly on the part of the mother.

Often ignorance is blind and unaware that it is ignorance, stupidly blundering through life; but this is not always the mother’s attitude. She may, indeed she often does, passionately desire knowledge and seek for it wherever she thinks she may find it in her restricted circle. Too tragically often she is baffled in her search.

Some years before the war, when I was lecturing at a Northern University, a little incident opened my eyes to this fact. I was young and had not encountered this aspect of life before, and it burnt itself into my consciousness as one of the most vivid impressions of my life. It was this:—

One of my students was a woman who was hoping to qualify as a medical doctor, and she was having tea with me and chatting about the events of the day. As part of her training she had been assisting the doctor in dealing with out-patients at a hospital, and a woman had brought in a miserable little baby, which wailed all the time and which the mother explained wouldn’t put on any flesh or grow into a nice, healthy baby whatever she did with it.

The mother, with tears in her eyes, made an intensely earnest appeal to the doctor to tell her what was to her unaccountably wrong with the infant.

She was a fine strapping woman, and thought her babies ought to be large and healthy. She said this was her third or fourth, and the others had all died when they were very little.

This happened more than seven years ago. Thank God our racial attitude has changed since then.

The doctor put her off with some soothing platitudes, but the woman driven to despair said: “I believe there’s something wrong with my man. If there’s something wrong with my man I won’t have babies no more—it’s just cruel to see them miserable like this and have them dying one after the other. Won’t you, for God’s sake, tell me whether there’s anything wrong with my man or not?” This appeal was met by the assurance that there was nothing wrong, and she should go on having babies and do her duty by her husband.

My medical woman student said that it was glaringly obvious that the baby was syphilitic.

I asked her why she did not immediately tell the mother the truth. She shrugged her shoulders and said: “I’ve got my exam. to pass; if I did a thing like that Dr. —— would stop me going to the hospital. I can’t afford to take risks like that. Why, he might not only stop me, but it would do the other women students a lot of harm too.”

This was before the war, and England was less enlightened, less eager for medical women’s assistance than the war has made her, and it was then a fight for a girl to get a footing in the hospitals for the wide experience she needed for a general practice.

I vowed to myself that I would never forget that mother, and that some day I would batter at the brazen gates of knowledge on her behalf.

Here was a mother with a glimmering of the truth, seeking passionately for knowledge from the one person she had a right to turn to for this knowledge, and she was put off with lies, encouraged again to bear the cost of a hopelessly doomed birth; to risk the agonies of child-birth, to bring into the world a creature who for a short spell would be tormented and then would cost her a coffin.

By refusing his scientific advice, that doctor in reality sent that woman, whose desire to know was stirred, to the gossip of the slum alley and the street corner. There she would get a blurred and inaccurate, if not actually harmful, idea of what he should have been able to tell her in a clean, simple language based on scientific fact.

When this is put down on paper, I feel as though it would be ridiculous to begin to point out the monstrous cruelty and the monstrous folly of such an action as that doctor’s. Yet such action was not isolated, it did not depend on one man’s warped conceptions of loyalty to another unknown man, “the husband.” Since the war a public realization of the racial destructiveness of such diseases has been increased and the woman and her husband would to-day be more likely to receive medical treatment.

But even to-day if a mother is truly told that there is “something wrong with her man,” would she also certainly be told how in wise and healthy fashion she can herself supplement what his criminal negligence neglected? If a husband is careless and callous a woman must save herself and the community from the waste and the misery of irretrievably doomed births.

She will indeed be an exceptionally lucky woman if she to-day finds in public hospitals doctors to whom she could turn for knowledge how best to control conception, though such knowledge is not only essential to her private well-being, but essential to her in the fulfilment of her duties as a citizen.

This little incident is but one illustration of many aspects of the subject. It is not only disease which necessitates restraint on parenthood. No healthy woman can bear a long series of infants in rapid succession without loss both to them and to herself. This is discussed in my Wise Parenthood.

Any one who thinks will see clearly that no civilized country, not even the richest in the world, can afford babies’ coffins. Though they are smaller than grown-up people’s they are more costly, for they are waste and nothing but waste. A grown-up individual, man or woman, has, we hope at any rate, given some return to the community in work or in ideas for all that his life has cost. But the infant’s death is sheer unmitigated waste.

If all the mothers who realize this and who feel their need for the best help that science can give them, would insist and persist in their enquiries for a knowledge of the most reliable results of modern science, they would in the end succeed in getting them. There is enough knowledge now in the world for the race to transform itself in a couple of generations.

CHAPTER XX
The Creation of a New and Irradiated Race