n any country a real tragedy. It is impossible to generalize with any
degree of confidence about the sexual nature of either man or woman in our
present state of crude and barbarous ignorance; but I am inclined--very
tentatively--to agree that this generalization is correct, and that the
creative impulse is an even stronger factor in the sexual life of women
than of men. I realize the cruelty of a civilization in which war and
its accessories create an artificial excess of women over men, and in
consequence deprive hundreds of thousands of women of motherhood. I do not
think I underestimate that cruelty or its tragic consequences. I admit the
"right" of women to the exercise of their vocation and the fulfilment of
their nature.

But I affirm that those who base upon this claim the right to bring
children into the world, where society has made marriage impossible, are
not moved to do so by the instinct of motherhood. No, no, for motherhood is
more than a physical act; it is a spiritual power. Its first thought is
not for the right of the mother but of the child. And what are a child's
rights? A home--two parents--all that makes complete the spiritual as well
as the material meaning of "home." I do not believe that there is any
woman who is the mother of young children, and a widow, who does not
daily realize how irreparable is the loss sustained by the fatherless. War
perhaps has inflicted that loss upon them; it is one of the iniquities of
war. And though the mother tries all she can--yes, and works miracles of
love to make herself all she _can_ be to her child, that loss cannot wholly
be made up. I speak with intensity of conviction on this point, for I have
myself a little adopted child--orphaned of both parents--in my home. I
never see other children with their parents without realizing what she has
lost not only in her mother but her father. There is needed the different
point of view, the different relationship, bringing with it a fuller and a
richer experience of life. What woman that hast lost her husband does not
realize the truth of what I say?

It is beside the mark to say that a bad father is worse than no father, or
that accident may take the father even from happily circumstanced homes.
This is true. But a woman does not deliberately _choose_ a bad father for
her children, or _choose_ that he shall be taken away from them by death.
It is the deliberate infliction beforehand of this great loss upon a child
t