ct music, but not without wives and mothers; and those times in a
nation's history when women have been social ornaments rather than
family home-stays have ever been times of national decadence and of
moral failure.

Part of this growing disinclination is due to the enormous expense
incurred now by having children. As women have ceased to take any
active share in their own housekeeping, whether in the kitchen or the
nursery, the consequence is an additional cost for service, which is a
serious item in the yearly accounts. Women who, if they lived a rational
life, could and would nurse their children, now require a wet-nurse, or
the services of an experienced woman who can "bring up by hand," as the
phrase is; women who once would have had one nursemaid now have two; and
women who, had they lived a generation ago, would have had none at all,
must in their turn have a wretched young creature without thought or
knowledge, into whose questionable care they deliver what should be the
most sacred obligation and the most jealously-guarded charge they
possess.

It is rare if, in any section of society where hired service can be had,
mothers give more than a superficial personal superintendence to nursery
or school-room--a superintendence about as thorough as their
housekeeping, and as efficient. The one set of duties is quite as
unfashionable as the other, and money is held to relieve from the
service of love as entirely as it relieves from the need of labor. And
yet, side by side with this personal relinquishment of natural duties,
has grown up, perhaps as an instinctive compensation, an amount of
attention and expensive management specially remarkable. There never was
a time when children were made of so much individual importance in the
family, yet in so little direct relation with the mother--never a time
when maternity did so little and social organization so much.

Juvenile parties; the kind of moral obligation apparently felt by all
parents to provide heated and unhealthy amusements for their boys and
girls during the holidays; extravagance in dress, following the same
extravagance among their mothers; the increasing cost of education; the
fuss and turmoil generally made over them--all render them real burdens
in a house where money is not too plentiful, and where every child that
comes is not only an additional mouth to feed and an additional body to
clothe, but a subtractor by just so much from the family fund of
pl