Its Causes--The Chief Cause
in the Mother--The Need of Rest During Pregnancy--Frequency of Premature
Birth--The Function of the State--Recent Advance in Puericulture--The
Question of Coitus During Pregnancy--The Need of Rest During
Lactation--The Mother's Duty to Suckle Her Child--The Economic
Question--The Duty of the State--Recent Progress in the Protection of the
Mother--The Fallacy of State Nurseries.

A man's sexual nature, like all else that is most essential in him, is
rooted in a soil that was formed very long before his birth. In this, as
in every other respect, he draws the elements of his life from his
ancestors, however new the recombination may be and however greatly it may
be modified by subsequent conditions. A man's destiny stands not in the
future but in the past. That, rightly considered, is the most vital of all
vital facts. Every child thus has a right to choose his own ancestors.
Naturally he can only do this vicariously, through his parents. It is the
most serious and sacred duty of the future father to choose one half of
the ancestral and hereditary character of his future child; it is the most
serious and sacred duty of the future mother to make a similar choice.[1]
In choosing each other they have between them chosen the whole ancestry of
their child. They have determined the stars that will rule his fate.

In the past that fateful determination has usually been made helplessly,
ignorantly, almost unconsciously. It has either been guided by an
instinct which, on the whole, has worked out fairly well, or controlled by
economic interests of the results of which so much cannot be said, or left
to the risks of lower than bestial chances which can produce nothing but
evil. In the future we cannot but have faith--for all the hope of humanity
must rest on that faith--that a new guiding impulse, reinforcing natural
instinct and becoming in time an inseparable accompaniment of it, will
lead civilized man on his racial course. Just as in the past the race has,
on the whole, been moulded by a natural, and in part sexual, selection,
that was unconscious of itself and ignorant of the ends it made towards,
so in the future the race will be moulded by deliberate selection, the
creative energy of Nature becoming self-conscious in the civilized brain
of man. This is not a faith which has its source in a vague hope. The
problems of the individual life are linked on to the fate of the racial
life, and again and