the old gas company. They are incompatible with it." Thus Mr. H. G.
Wells.

Whilst this sort of thing passes for thinking, it is a task that has
little promise in it to demand a return to the study of human nature,
and insist that only by obeying it can we command it, as Bacon said of
Nature at large. Meanwhile the madness proceeds apace; nursery-schools,
wretched parody of the nursery, are advocated at length in even Fabian
tracts, and the writer who suggests that an elder sister may be
receiving the highest kind of education in staying at home and helping
her mother, would sound almost to himself like an echo from the dead
past did he not know that neither a Plato nor a million tons of moderns
can walk through human nature or any other fact as if it were not
there.

Whatever be our duty to the girl of the working-classes, no man can deny
the importance of performing it aright. She will become the wife of the
working-man. From her thus flows most of the birth-rate. If our
education of her is wrong, it is a very great wrong for millions of
individuals and for the whole of society. But let us look at the case of
her more fortunate sister.

The girl of the more fortunate classes is certain to be well cared for
in the matter of air and food and light and exercise. We have already
seen how this matter of exercise requires to be qualified and determined
as for motherhood--that is, unless we desire most suicidally to educate
all the most promising stocks of the nation out of existence. But now
what do we owe to her in the matter of providing the right kind of
intellectual, moral, spiritual, psychical environment? It is a pity to
flounder with so many adjectives, but nearly all the available ones are
forsworn and fail to express my meaning. Let us, however, speak of the
spiritual environment, seeking to free that word from all its lamentable
associations of superstition and cant, and to associate it rather with a
humanized kind of religion that deals with humanity as made by, living
upon, and destined for, this earth, whatever unseen worlds there may or
may not be to conquer.

It is our business, then, to provide the spiritual environment in which
the maternal instinct is favoured and seen to be supremely honourable.
If in the "best" girls' schools ideas of marriage and babies are
ridiculed, the sooner these schools be rubbed down again into the soil,
the better. There is no need to substitute one form of cant for
anothe