is the highest
and foremost work that can be named; and therefore, in the second place,
she whose business it is must not be hampered by having to do anything
else. If any labourer is worthy of his hire, she is. Her economic
security must be absolute. She must be as safe as the Bank of England,
because England and its banks stand or fall with her. In the rightly
constituted State, if there be any one at all whose provision and
maintenance are absolutely secure, it will be the mothers. Whoever else
has financial anxiety, they shall have none. Any State that can afford
to exist can afford to see to this. No economist can inform me what
proportion of the labour and resources of England are at this moment
devoted to the means of life, and what proportion to superfluities,
luxuries and the means of death. But it is a very simple matter with
which the reader, who is doubtless a better arithmetician than I am, may
amuse himself, to estimate the number of married women of reproductive
age in the community, and allowing anything in reason for illegitimate
motherhood and nothing at all for infertile wives, to satisfy himself
that the total cost which would be involved in the adequate care of
motherhood, is a mere fraction of the national expenditure. Few of us
realize how extraordinary and how unprecedented is the margin of
security for existence which modern civilization affords. A savage
community may have scarcely any margin at all. The same may be true of
many primitive communities which cannot be called savage. They maintain
life under such conditions, whether in Greenland or in a thousand other
parts of the world, that they cannot afford to labour for anything which
is not bread. The primary necessities of existence take all their
getting. Some transient accident of weather or the balance of Nature in
the sea or in the fields imperils the existence of the whole community.
They, at any rate, are wise enough to take good care of their women and
children. But in civilization we have an enormous margin of security.
Not only are we dependent on no local crop or harvest, but the getting
of necessities has become so effective and secure that we are able to
spend a vast amount of our time and energy on the production of luxuries
and evils. How little, then, is our excuse if we fail to provide the
first conditions for continuance and progress!

Our first principles of the value of the child and therefore of
motherhood are unchallen