gested, as the
insertion of a claim to capacity for motherhood. This claim is of course
unconscious, but Nature does not always make us aware of the purposes
which she exercises through us. Now, though the corset serves to draw
attention to certain factors of motherhood, in point of fact it is
injurious to that end, and is on that highest of all grounds to be
condemned. I return to the point that possibly the direct and formal
condemnation of the corset may be in some cases less effective than the
method, which must have some value for every girl, of placing before her
eyes representations of the female figure, showing beauty and capacity
for motherhood as completely fused because they are indeed one.
Constrain the girl to admit that that is as beautiful as can be, and
then ask her what she thinks the corset applied to such a figure could
possibly accomplish.

Surely the same principle applies to what the girl reads. Some of us
become more and more convinced that youth, being naturally more
intelligent than maturity, prefers and requires more subtlety in its
teaching. In addressing a meeting of men, say upon politics, a speaker's
first business is to be crude. He has no chance whatever unless he is
direct, unqualified, allowing nothing at all for any kind of
intelligence or self-constructive faculty in the minds of his hearers.
Let any one recall the catchwords, styled watchwords, of politics
during the last ten or twenty years, and he will see how men are to be
convinced.

But it is all very well to treat men as fools, provided that you do not
say so--the case is different with young people, and certainly not less
with girls than with boys. Mr. Kipling, in one of those earlier moments
of insight that sometimes almost persuade us to pardon the brutality
which year by year becomes more than ever the dominant note of his
teaching, once told us of the discomfiture of a member of Parliament, or
person of that kind, who went to a boys' school to lecture about
Patriotism, and who unfurled a Union Jack amid the dead silence of the
disgusted boys. He forgot that, for once, he was speaking to an
intelligent audience, which demands something a little less crude than
the kind of thing which wins elections and makes and unmakes governments
and policies.

There is certainly a lesson here for those who are entrusted with the
supreme responsibility, so immeasurably more political than politics, of
forming the girl's mind for her f