es, as we have seen, not less than half
the natural composition of future generations. But its _individual_
importance can easily be over-estimated, and that is an error which I
have specially sought to avoid in this book, which is certainly an
attempt to call or recall women to motherhood. It is not as if physical
motherhood were the whole of human motherhood. Racially, it is the
substantial whole; individually, it is but a part of the whole, and a
smaller fraction in our species than in any humbler form of life.
Everyone knows maiden aunts who are better, more valuable, completer
mothers in every non-physical way than the actual mothers of their
nephews and nieces. This is woman's wonderful prerogative, that, in
virtue of her _psyche_, she can realize herself, and serve others, on
feminine lines, and without a pang of regret or a hint anywhere of
failure, even though she forego physical motherhood. This book,
therefore, is a plea not only for Motherhood but for
Foster-Motherhood--that is, Motherhood all-but-physical. In time to come
the great professions of nursing and teaching will more and more engage
and satisfy the lives and the powers of Virgin-Mothers without number.
Let no woman prove herself so ignorant or contemptuous of great things
as to suggest that these are functions beneath the dignity of her
complete womanhood.

But many a young girl, passing from her finishing-school--which has
perhaps not quite succeeded, despite its best efforts, in finishing her
womanhood--and coming under the influence of some of our modern
champions of womanhood, might well be excused for throwing such a book
as this from her, scorning to admit the glorious conditions which
declare that woman is more for the Future than for the Present, and that
if the Future is to be safeguarded, or even to be, they must not be
transgressed. I have watched young girls, wearing the beautiful colours
which have been captured by one section of the suffrage movement, asking
their way to headquarters for instructions as to procedure, and I have
wondered whether, in twenty years, they will look back wholly with
content at the consequences. Some time ago the illustrated papers
provided us with photographs of a person, originally female, "born to be
love visible," as Ruskin says, who had mastered jiu-jitsu for
suffragette purposes, and was to be seen throwing various hapless men
about a room. And only the day before I write, the papers have given us
a