o act like blind automata, as
improvident and irresponsible as the lower fishes, until the actual
birth of the future. The philosophic truth that the future is nascent in
the present--a truth so genuinely philosophic that it is also
practical--is still hidden from us, and thus we are faced, in town and
country alike, with ignorant motherhood, set to the most difficult,
responsible, and expert of tasks--the right nurture of babyhood;
babyhood, a ridiculous subject for grown men, yet somehow the condition
of them and all their doings.

In this state of affairs, those who began the modern campaign against
infant mortality, or rather that small section of them who were not to
be beguiled by secondaries, such as poverty, alcoholism, and the like,
set to work to remedy maternal ignorance. Having been engaged in this
campaign for many years, one is not likely to decry it now, nor is there
any occasion to do so. The movement for the instruction of motherhood
and for the instruction even of girls in the duties of actual
motherhood, is now not only started but making real progress, and will
assuredly prosper.

But here our business is to think a little in front of action done and
doing, and we shall very soon discover that there is more for public
opinion yet to learn, while we may be very certain that this last lesson
will be less easily learnt than the former was, for it is based upon
evidence much less obvious. I have long maintained that the movement
against infant mortality must precede in logic and in practice movements
for the physical training of boys and girls, for the medical inspection
and treatment of school children, and so forth. Relatively to these I
have always asserted that the right care of babies has the immense
superiority that it means beginning at the beginning, but I have always
denied that it means beginning at the absolute beginning, if such a
phrase be permitted.

Given the world as it is, the conditions of marriage as they are, the
economic position of woman, the power of prudery, and the conventional
supposition that babies occur by providential dispensation, we must act
as if we really made the assumption that human parenthood, until the
moment of birth, is as irresponsible as any sequence of events in the
atmosphere or the world of electrons. But we who are thinking in front
for humanity must make no such assumption. We must look forward to and
hasten the time when we can act upon the _true_ assum