f 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