hysical dangers. Man has developed under this social pressure a sense
of chivalry and a tendency to "save women and children first" which
give noble examples of courage and self-sacrifice to fire the
imagination of each new generation. Has the father-office developed
such many-sided and adequate protective service to childhood that
mothers have been able to "lay down their arms" and rest content in
the knowledge that their children are shielded from every danger? It
seems not. In the days when women were ignorant of all outside their
homes they may have felt so secure because not understanding the cause
of many family tragedies. In the days when they had no power to change
conditions affecting the home from without they may have felt excused
from the protective function of early motherhood, since men had taken
over physical defense and economic support and the relationship of the
family group to the social whole. No open-eyed woman in a country
giving women social, economic, and political power can so think
to-day.

It is a far cry from the savage mother, beating back some beast of the
jungle or the plain, to the modern mother whose physical protection
and that of her children is amply provided not alone by the husband
and father concerned but by organized society with its police power,
its courts and laws. The dangers that threaten child-life to-day in
the more civilized communities are not the same that threatened the
young of the herd-pack or the early lives of primitive men and women.
Then the mother had sometimes to defend her child against its own
father, especially her girl-babies against the social fiat of death
executed by the father's will. Ancient folk-lore and myth show us many
a struggle, intense and cruel, between mother-love and this
group-sentence of death upon some of its young. In case of war also
the ancient mother had to protect her virgin daughters against outrage
and capture, albeit so feebly and to so disastrous an end. And war,
since it is always and by its nature must be a return to savage
conditions, now leads to the sacrifice of women and children in much
the ancient manner; and faced by its horrors at close touch, the
mother-instinct essays the old task to the same bitter defeat.

In peaceful periods, however, in the long ages when the father-rule
was a despotism tempered only by natural affection and the skill of
women in securing advantages while simulating submission, mothers had
large u