ther, in her new role of idealist and
life-manager never, practically for one single moment, gives her child
the unthinking response from the deep dynamic centers. No, she gives
it what is good for it. She shoves milk in its mouth as the clock
strikes, she shoves it to sleep when the milk is swallowed, and she
shoves it ideally through baths and massage, promenades and practice,
till the little organism develops like a mushroom to stand on its own
feet. Then she continues her ideal shoving of it through all the
stages of an ideal up-bringing, she loves it as a chemist loves his
test-tubes in which he analyzes his salts. The poor little object is
his mother's ideal. But of her head she dictates his providential
days, and by the force of her deliberate mentally-directed love-will
she pushes him up into boyhood. The poor little devil never knows one
moment when he is not encompassed by the beautiful, benevolent,
idealistic, Botticelli-pure, and finally obscene love-will of the
mother. Never, never one mouthful does he drink of the milk of human
kindness: always the sterilized milk of human benevolence. There is no
mother's milk to-day, save in tigers' udders, and in the udders of
sea-whales. Our children drink a decoction of ideal love, at the
breast.

Never for one moment, poor baby, the deep warm stream of love from the
mother's bowels to his bowels. Never for one moment the dark proud
recoil into rest, the soul's separation into deep, rich independence.
Never this lovely rich forgetfulness, as a cat trots off and utterly
forgets her kittens, utterly, richly forgets them, till suddenly,
click, the dynamic circuit reverses itself in her, and she remembers,
and rages round in a frenzy, shouting for her young.

Our miserable infants never know this joy and richness and pang of real
maternal warmth. Our wonderful mothers never let us out of their minds
for one single moment. Not for a second do they allow us to escape from
their ideal benevolence. Not one single breath does a baby draw, free
from the imposition of the pure, unselfish, Botticelli-holy, detestable
_love-will_ of the mother. Always the _will_, the will, the love-will,
the ideal will, directed from the ideal mind. Always this stone, this
scorpion of maternal nourishment. Always this infernal self-conscious
Madonna starving our living guts and bullying us to death with her love.

We have made the idea supplant both impulse and tradition. We have no
spark of wh