tion for us because they have not waited first to discover its
fundamentals. The rights of mothers can be approached only from the
point of view of the rights of children. We may happen to believe, as
the present writer certainly does, that parents should be responsible
for their children. He once lectured for, and published the lectures in
association with, a body called the British Constitution Association,
which holds the same belief, but when he found as he did that protests
were raised against any suggestion to help children whose parents do not
do their duty, it became plain that principles which were right in a
merely secondary and conditional way were being made absolute and
fundamental. The fundamental is that the child shall be cared for; the
conditional and secondary principle is that this is best effected
through the parents. To say that if the parents will not do it, the
child must be left to starve, is immoral and indecent. Worse words than
those, if such exist, would be required to describe our neglect of
illegitimate infancy; our cruelty toward widows and orphans; our utterly
careless maintenance of the conditions which produce these hapless
beings in such vast numbers.

If every child is sacred, every mother is sacred. If every child is to
be cared for, every mother must be cared for. It is true that we may
make experiment with devices for superseding the mother. Man has
impudent assurance enough for anything, and if Nature has been working
at the perfection of an instrument for her purpose during a few score
million years--an instrument such as the mammalian mother, for
instance--man is quite prepared to invent social devices, such as the
incubator, the _creche_, the infant milk _depot_, and so forth; not
merely to make the best of a bad case when the mother fails, but to
supersede the mother altogether directly the baby is born. Such cases,
except in the last resort, are more foolish than words can say. We have
to save our children; we can only do so effectively through the
naturally appointed means for saving children, which is motherhood. The
rights of mothers follow as a necessary consequence from our first
principle, which was the rights of children. Because every child must
be protected, every mother must be protected, if not in one way, in
another.

The State may not be able to afford this. The necessities of existence
may be so difficult to obtain, not to mention for a moment such luxuries
as