enthusiasm. The birth-rate is as low as Malthusians
could desire. But all its care is but an attempt to lessen evils brought
about by a wrong system; for the mothers of Bradford are not in their
homes, but in woolen factories.

County Roscommon is a poor district in Ireland, with a primitive and
superstitious population of agriculturists; the birth-rate is very high,
and there is practically no public provision for the safeguarding of
infant life. But its backward ignorant mothers tend and feed their
babies after the manner of the earliest ages.

_The infant death-rate is 135 in Bradford, and 35 in Roscommon._

You will see what I wish to make plain. Those whom I criticize are
dealing with symptoms instead of working to remove the real cause of the
disease. They work hard and achieve little. Of course their efforts are
praiseworthy, and, under present conditions, frightfully necessary. But
they are just about as lastingly useful as trying to mend a badly broken
china cup at home with cheap cement. You know what happens: as soon as
you succeed in getting two pieces to stick together another piece
tumbles away, and, at last, if by excessive patience the work gets done
and the cup is mended, the first shock of hot water makes all the pieces
again fall apart. It is a solution that gives great opportunity of
employment, one indeed that goes on forever; perhaps that is why it
fascinates the child-like minds of the feminists. I want something very
different.

I want a tradition of life to hand on to our daughters and to their
daughters. We need a strongly deepened sense of womanly responsibility,
wide-spread and universally accepted; an up-to-date sense, if you like
that term. I have no fears of change. I would re-fix our moral standards
more fearlessly than many who think me old-fashioned. But what I want
to insist upon is this: _The standard of conduct must be fixed for
women._ Our children want something settled, not everything left
uncertain. Our morals (I do not mean our sexual morals only, but our
whole ethical and social conduct) has become like a skein of wool that
has been unraveled by a puppy. We want a firm broad way in which it is
good and possible for all of us to walk without hurting one another, not
the horrid scramble that to-day we accept as life.

The modern conception of personal rights is essentially individualistic,
and has arisen only under industrial values of life; the result of its
further applica