the parental instinct naturally strong, and who will, on the
average, transmit a high measure of it to their offspring. In a
generation bred on these principles--a generation consisting only of
babies who were loved before they were born--there would be a proportion
of sympathy, of tender feeling, and of all those great, abstract,
world-creating passions which are evolved from the tender emotion, such
as no age hitherto has seen.

It was necessary to insert this eugenic paragraph because it expresses
the central principle of all real reform, as fundamental and
all-important as it is unknown to all political parties, and I fear to
nearly all philanthropists as well. But, for the present, our immediate
concern is the application, if such be possible, of our knowledge of the
parental instinct to the education of girls. Being indeed an instinct it
can be neither made nor acquired, but, like every other factor of
humanity that is given by inheritance, it depends upon the conditions in
which it finds itself. Education being the provision of an environment,
there is no higher task for the educator than to provide the right
environment for the maternal instinct in adolescence. We are to look
upon it as at once delicate and ineradicable. These are adjectives which
may seem incompatible, yet they may both be verified. Any one will
testify that, in a given environment, say that of high school or
university or that of the worst types of what is called society, the
maternal instinct may then and there, and for that period, become a
nonentity in many a girl. Hence we are entitled to say that it is
delicate; much more delicate, for instance, than what we have agreed to
call the racial instinct, which is far more imperious and by no means so
easily to be suppressed.

But, on the other hand, just because this is an instinct, part of the
fundamental constitution, and not a something planted from without, it
is ineradicable. I doubt whether even in the most abandoned female
drunkard it would not be possible to find, when the right environment
was provided, that the maternal instinct was still undestroyed. One is,
of course, not speaking of that rare and aberrant variety of women in
whom the instinct is naturally weak--naturally weak as distinguished
from the atrophy induced by improper nurture.

Our business, then, having recognized, so to speak, the natural history
of this instinct, and further, having come to realize its stupendous