the claim in her case has a double strength, since it is made
valid not only by her own interests but by those of the future. The
future must be protected, and therefore she who is its vessel must be
protected. This is no more than the sub-human mother everywhere has as
her birthright, and however much this teaching may offend the common
male assumption that a wife is a form of property, the future certainly
holds within itself the establishment of this principle.

The question of divorce is so important that we must defer it to the
next chapter.

We have briefly alluded to the question of the wife's possession of
herself. We must now refer to the question, scarcely less important, of
her possession of her own property and her claims upon her husband's. It
is difficult for the present generation to realize that very few decades
have passed since the time when everything which a woman possessed
became, when she married, the property of her husband. That is now a
question which there is no need to discuss, but there remains a very
great issue, lately become prominent, and suggested by the popular
phrase, the endowment of motherhood.

We should obviously be false to our first principles if we did not
assent with all our hearts to the _fundamental_ principle expressed by
this phrase. If it is necessary that the wife be protected as a wife, it
is even more necessary that she be protected as a mother. There are
twelve hundred thousand widows in this country at the present time, and
of these a large number stand in unaided parental relation to a great
multitude of children. I showed some years ago that, as we shall see in
more detail in a later chapter, alcohol makes not less than forty-five
thousand widows and orphans every year in England and Wales. Nothing
can be more certain than that, in the interests of all except the
worthless type of man, the economic protection of motherhood is an
urgent need, less open to criticism perhaps than any other economic
reconstruction proposed by the reformer. Some will argue, of course,
that the State is to look after children directly, but I, for one, as a
biologist, have no choice but to believe that the way to save children
is to safeguard parenthood, and I cannot question that our duty is to
provide the mother with the necessary means for performing her supreme
function, whether she has a living husband or is a widow or is
unmarried.

The question remains, how is this to be done, a