implant, but which is already part
of the plant, so to speak, and which it is for us to tend. Like other
innate features of mankind, its transmission from generation to
generation is notably independent of the effects of education, the
effects of use and disuse. This is a difficult thing of which to
persuade people, but it is the fact. Education, environment, training,
opportunity, habit, public opinion, social prejudice--all these and
such other influences may and do affect the maternal instinct in the
individual for good or for evil. No fact is more certain or important,
and that is precisely why we must study this instinct. But the effect
upon the individual does not involve any effect upon the native
constitution of the individual's children. From age to age the general
facts and features of the human backbone persist. We do not expect to
find notable differences between the generations in such a radical
feature of our constitution, no matter what particular habits of
posture, play, and the like we adopt. The maternal instinct is scarcely
less fundamental; it is certainly no whit less essential for the
species. It is the very backbone of our psychological constitution. Thus
it is nonsense to assert that, for instance, women are becoming less
motherly, if by this is meant that the maternal instinct is failing.
That bad education may affect it for evil no one can question, but we
must distinguish between nature and nurture. We may be perfectly
confident that so far as the _natural_ material of girl-childhood and
girlhood is concerned, there is no falling off; there will not, for
there cannot, be any falling off either in the quality or in the
quantity of the maternal instinct. On the contrary, it can, and will
later be shown that through the action of heredity this instinct will be
strengthened in the future, just in so far as motherhood becomes more
and more a special privilege of those women in whom this instinct is
strong, and who become mothers for the _only good reason_--that they
love to have children of their own.

I protest, then, against many critics, especially those who used to
raise their now silent voices in opposition to the beginnings of the
infant mortality campaign a few years ago, that we who criticize modern
motherhood and find in its defects the causes of many and great evils,
as we do, are asserting nothing whatever against the women of this day
as compared with the women of former days, so far as