importance for the individual and the race, is to tend it assiduously
as the very highest and most precious thing in the girls for whom we
care. As educators we must seek to provide the environment in which this
instinct can flourish. It is a good thing to be an elder sister, not
merely because the girl has opportunities of learning the ways of babies
and the details of their needs, but for a far deeper reason. Babies do
have very detailed and urgent needs, but these can be learnt without
much difficulty, and, if necessary, at very short notice. More important
is it for the whole development of the character and for the making of
the worthiest womanhood that an elder sister is provided with an
environment in which her maternal instinct can grow and grow in grace.

Much might be said on this head as to some of our present educational
practices. The kind of educationist with whom no one would trust a
poodle for half an hour may and does constantly assume, on a scale
involving millions of children, from year to year, that all is well if
the girl be taken from home and put into a school and made to learn by
heart, or at any rate by rote, the rubbish with which our youth is fed
even yet in the great name of education: though perchance whilst she is
thus being injured in body and mind and character, she might at home be
playing the little mother, helping to make the home a home, serving the
highest interests of her parents, her younger brothers and sisters and
herself at the same time--not to mention the unborn. Such a protest as
this, however, will be little heeded. There is no political party which
cares about education or even wants to know in what it consists. The
most persistent and clever and resourceful of those parties--of which, I
fear, the Fabian Society is far too good to be representative--only half
believes in the family, and is daily, and ever with more lamentable
success, seeking to substitute for the home some collective device or
other precisely as rational as that scheme of Plato's whereby the babies
were to be shuffled so that no mother should recognize her own baby,
while the fathers, need it be said, were to be as gloriously
irresponsible as under the schemes for the endowment of motherhood.
"Socialism intervenes between the children and the parents.... Socialism
in fact is the State family. The old family of the private individual
must vanish before it, just as the old waterworks of private enterprise,
or