'honneur a leurs porteurs que les symboles de
sa destruction. Que les femmes s'impregnent de plus en plus de
cette profonde verite! Elles cesseront alors de cacher leur
grossesse et d'en avoir honte. Conscientes de la grandeur de leur
tache sexuelle et sociale, elles tiendront haut l'etendard de notre
descendance, qui est celui de la veritable vie a venir de l'homme,
tout en combattant pour l'emancipation de leur sexe."

This passage recalls one of Ruskin's, which is to be found in "Unto This
Last":--

"Nearly all labour may be shortly divided into positive and
negative labour--positive, that which produces life; negative, that
which produces death; the most directly negative labour being
murder, and the most directly positive the bearing and rearing of
children; so that in the precise degree in which murder is hateful
on the negative side of idleness, in that exact degree
child-rearing is admirable, on the positive side of idleness."

Here is the right comment upon the swaggering display of the means of
death and the hiding as if shameful of the signs of life to come. What
has Mrs. Grundy to say to this? Will she consider the propriety of
urging in future that it is murder and the means of murder, and the
organized forces of capital and politics making for murder, that must
not be mentioned before children, and must be hidden as shameful from
the eyes of men; and while a woman may still glory in her hair,
according to that spiritual precept of St. Paul: "But if a woman have
long hair it is a glory to her; for her hair is given her for a
covering," perhaps she may be permitted even to glory in her motherhood,
contemptible as such a notion would doubtless have seemed to the Apostle
of the Gentiles.

XI

EDUCATION FOR MOTHERHOOD

It is our first principle in this discussion that the individual exists
for parenthood, being a natural invention for that purpose and no other.
It has been shown further that this is more pre-eminently true of woman
than of man, she being the more essential--if such a phrase can be
used--for the continuance of the race. If these principles are valid
they must indeed determine our course in the education of girls. Some
incidental reference has already been made to this subject, but the
matter must be more carefully gone into here. We have seen that there
are right and wrong ways of conducting the physical training of