schoolmistresses, who should know so much better, that it is good to see
the young things falling in love, and that the sooner they are married
the better. Every one whose eyes are open knows how often the
consequences of such teaching and practice are disastrous; and if there
is anything which we should discourage in our present study, it is that
marriage in haste and repentance at leisure to which these blind guides
so often lead their blind victims.

Very different, however, will the case be when the victims are no longer
blind. The condemnation of their blind guides at the present time is not
that they regard it as right and healthy that young people should mate
in their early twenties, but it is that by every means in their power,
positive and negative, these blind guides have striven to prevent the
light from reaching their victim's eyes. The day is coming, however,
when the principles of education for parenthood--for which, if for
anything, this book is a plea--will be accepted and practised, and then
the case will be very different.

Convinced though I certainly am of the vast importance of nature or
heredity in the human constitution, I am not one of those eugenists who,
to the grave injury of their cause, declare that there are no such
things as nurture and education, in that they effect nothing; nor do I
believe it in any way inherently necessary that perhaps ten years after
puberty a girl should still be irresponsible in those matters which,
incomparably beyond all others, demand responsibility; or incapable,
with wise help or even without it, of guiding her course aright. It is
we, as I repeat for the thousandth time, who are to blame, for our
deliberate, systematic, and disastrous folly in scrupulously excluding
from her education that for which the whole of education, of any other
kind, should be regarded as the preparation.

No one can attach more than its due importance to woman's function of
choosing the fathers of the future; rejecting the unworthy and selecting
the worthy for this greatest of human duties. It would be a most serious
difficulty for those who hold such a creed if it were that a girl's
taste and judgment could be trusted, if at all, only some years after
she had reached physical maturity for motherhood. It may be that in the
present conditions of girls' education, such right direction of this
choice as occurs, is just as likely to occur at the earlier age as at
any later one, when in