nd if the blame was
theirs, they were blameworthy. But mothers they were, with the duties
of mothers to perform, and therefore with the rights of mothers. They
got their concert and were all the better for the remarkably indifferent
music of which it consisted, as such concerts commonly do; and I am only
very sorry if any of them argued therefrom that she had nothing in the
past to regret.

But the spiritual attitude revealed in the question, "Do they deserve
it?" is one which must speedily go to its own place. Let us strive to
dignify marriage, to educate the young of both sexes for parenthood, to
reduce illegitimacy, to reward virtue. But where there is motherhood in
being, whether expectant or achieved, we have a duty which is the
highest and most sacred of all because it is the Future that we are
called upon to serve, and upon us it wholly depends.

As Mr. John Burns said to our first Infant Mortality Conference in Great
Britain in 1907, "Let us dignify, purify and glorify motherhood by every
means in our power." Evidently this can only be done through marriage,
which is in its very essence an institution for the dignifying of
motherhood. But a biological writer cannot distinguish as a theologian
can between legal and extra-legal motherhood. He may declare that
motherhood is hideously illegitimate when it is forced upon a wife
married to an inebriate degenerate. He may accept marriage with all his
heart as an institution which for him has natural sanctions millions of
years older than any Church or State or mankind itself. But for him as a
student of life all motherhood must be guarded as such--even if it be
guarded in such a fashion that it can never recur, which is our duty to
the feeble-minded mother.

If there be any reader who is unacquainted with M. Maeterlinck's "Life
of the Bee," let him or her study that instructive book. Let him ask why
the queen is the End of the hive, why all is for her. Let him ask
whether the natural law upon which this depends--the law that all
individuals are mortal--does not apply to all races, even our own, and
perhaps he will come to agree that the rights of mothers are the oldest
and deepest and most necessary of any rights that can be named.

And the recognition and granting of them--as they must necessarily be
recognized and granted in every living race that depends upon
motherhood--is even more imperative in our case than in any other, since
human motherhood makes more dem