t, then, as to the
value of the tasks, no question as to their being worthy national
obligations. It was a question of fitting herself for them.

But what has happened? In the process of preparing herself to
discharge more adequately her task as a woman in a republic, her
respect for the task has been weakened. In this process, which we call
emancipation, she has in a sense lost sight of the purposes of
emancipation. Interested in acquiring new tools, she has come to
believe the tools more important than the thing for which she was to
use them. She has found out that with education and freedom, pursuits
of all sorts are open to her, and by following these pursuits she can
preserve her personal liberty, avoid the grave responsibility, the
almost inevitable sorrows and anxieties, which belong to family life.
She can choose her friends and change them. She can travel, and
gratify her tastes, satisfy her personal ambitions. The snare has been
too great; the beauty and joy of free individual life have dulled the
sober sense of national obligation. The result is that she is
frequently failing to discharge satisfactorily some of the most
imperative demands the nation makes upon her.

Take as an illustration the moral training of the child. The most
essential obligation in a Woman's Business is establishing her
household on a sound moral basis. If a child is anchored to basic
principles, it is because his home is built on them. If he understands
integrity as a man, it is usually because a woman has done her work
well. If she has not done it well, it is probable that he will be a
disturbance and a menace when he is turned over to society. Sending
defective steel to a gunmaker is no more certain to result in unsafe
guns than turning out boys who are shifty and tricky is to result in a
corrupt and unhappy community.

Appalled by the seriousness of the task, or lured from it by the joys
of liberty and education, the woman has too generally shifted it to
other shoulders--shoulders which were waiting to help her work out the
problem, but which could never be a substitute. She has turned over
the child to the teacher, secular and religious, and fancied that he
might be made a man of integrity by an elaborate system of teaching in
a mass. Has this shifting of responsibility no relation to the general
lowering of our commercial and political morality?

For years we have been bombarded with evidence of an appalling
indifference to t