difference scores of times. It is
beautiful because it suggests the ideal of every pregnancy--that the
expectant mother shall indeed _expect_, look forward to the life which
is to be. Her motto in the ideal world or even in the world at the
foundations of which we are painfully working, will be those words of
the Nicene creed which the very term must recall to the mind--_Expecto
resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi saeculi_.

Let any one who fancies that these pre-occupations with mere language
are trivial or misplaced here take the opportunity of addressing two
drawing-rooms under similar conditions, on some such subject as the care
of pregnancy from the national point of view. Let him in the one case
speak of the pregnant woman, and so forth, and in the other of the
expectant mother. He will be singularly insensitive to his audience if
he does not discover that sometimes a rose by any other name is somehow
the less a rose. The more fools we perhaps, but there it is, and in the
most important of all contemporary propaganda, which is that of the
re-establishment of parenthood in that place of supreme honour which is
its due, even such "literary" debates as these are not out of place.

Sex is a great and wonderful thing. The further down we go in the scale
of life, whether animal or vegetable, the more do we perceive the
importance of the evolution of sex. The correctly formed adjective from
this word is sexual, but the term is practically taboo with Mrs. Grundy.
Only with caution and anxiety, indeed, may one venture before a lay
audience to use Darwin's phrase, "sexual selection." The fact is utterly
absurd, but there it is. One of the devices for avoiding its
consequences is the use of sex itself as an adjective, as when we speak
of sex problems; but the special importance of this case is in regard to
the sexual instinct, or, if the term offends the reader, let us say the
sex instinct. Here prudery is greatly concerned, and our silence here
involves much of the price of prudery. Now since the word sexual has
become sinister, we cannot speak to the growing boy or girl about the
sexual instinct, but we may do much better.

For what is this sexual instinct? True, it manifests itself in
connection with the fact of sex, but essentially that is only because
sex is a condition of human reproduction or parenthood. It is this with
which the sexual instinct is really concerned, and perhaps we shall
never learn to look upo