rtant of
life's lessons. Two or more children growing up together are twice as
easy to manage and to teach as is one alone, and infinitely happier in
every way. Later on, schoolfellows to a certain extent supply the
deficiency, but the only child is still no less an object for
commiseration, as are his parents. All their hopes are centred in the
one, and, as the circumstances almost inevitably combine to spoil the
one, their hopes are more or less handicapped. Parents find out too late
that they have made a mistake.

I was at a children's party not long ago where 'sole hopes' were greatly
in the majority. A lovely little family trio consisting of a boy and two
tiny girls was much admired and the mother openly envied. Several of the
mothers present said they often wished that Joan or Tommy had a brother
or sister. As few of the children mentioned were over five, the
difficulty did not seem insuperable, but opinions were unanimous among
the ladies that it was 'too late to start the nursery again'; 'it was no
good unless the two could grow up together, five years was too great a
gap,' and so on. No doubt they will one day bitterly regret their
timidity, as many women to my personal knowledge have already done. Joan
or Tommy may be taken from them, or what is worse may turn out unloving
and undutiful, and in that sad day they will have no other children to
turn to.

If the facile writers of those endless newspaper articles on the
degeneracy of modern women really wish to make good their case, they had
better abandon their foolish complaints as to women's inability to
manage the spinning-wheel or preserve pickles, and other tasks which the
progress of machinery have rendered unnecessary. Let them instead turn
their attention for proof of degeneracy to the strange helplessness of
middle-class mothers in training their children, and their dread of
nursery complications. I know many a woman whose financial ability and
capacity for organising almost amounts to genius, who would doubtless
not be at a loss in dealing with a burglar, yet who would on no account
face the terrors of a longish railway journey in sole charge of her
two-year-old child, whilst to 'take the baby at night' once in a way
during the nurse's absence from home is a nerve-shattering experience
which necessitates at least one day's complete rest in bed afterwards.

'To start the nursery again,' with all its complicated machinery, when
the sole hope has got ov