Life is so const.i.tuted 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 succ.u.mb. 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 a.s.similative powers so impaired, as to interfere gravely with growth and development. Degrees of "shock," akin to sh.e.l.l-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 subst.i.tute for the home and for their mothers--which are every child's birthright--more and more, infants and young children are consigned now to Creches; chill inst.i.tutions 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 const.i.tuted 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 fort.i.tude, 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 pa.s.sers-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 un.o.bservant 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 cla.s.ses; 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 prost.i.tutes, 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, const.i.tutional 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 subst.i.tutes 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 apt.i.tude 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 s.p.a.ces 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 a.s.sociates, 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 sh.e.l.l, 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 s.e.x. Were there not women whose lives are pa.s.sed 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.

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 s.e.x--is no reason for dissembling the truth that in wifehood and motherhood lie woman's most vital and valuable roles.

Nor is it warrant for training the whole s.e.x as though none were destined to fulfil this, their natural and n.o.blest--if not always, their happiest vocation.