spring or summer garden than in the chill of the winter months, and even the actual expense of the birth is reduced when it takes place in the warmth of the spring or early summer when fires and the labour they involve will be saved.

The child too has warm air to surround it on its first introduction to the outer world after its long period of warmth and protection within its mother, and when in a month or two it is able to kick about on the grass, it benefits directly from the rays of the sun and also from the sun-warmed earth.

Various notable men and women, and, in particular, the famous Dr. Trall of America, have held that the actual hour of conception is the one of fate, and that the moods, feelings and conditions of the parents in that hour work more vital magic then than they can do in any succeeding days or weeks. Instinctively, one would like to feel that this is so. Indeed it will take much to disprove it, although it is a theme which it is at present impossible to prove, and it must remain always only a personal bias, until thousands of people who view marriage aright will consciously observe and record many things and contribute them to some thinker who will tabulate, correlate and understand them.

Whether the hour of conception affects the child directly or not, the memory of an ardent and wonderful experience in which the pair of lovers consciously surround themselves with beautiful conditions, and deliberately place themselves through their love at the service of God and humanity in the creation of the next generation, must give a vitalizing and joyous memory to both throughout all their lives. This memory being especially connected with the dear child of that union must, therefore, have in this indirect way at any rate a positive racial value.

CHAPTER III
The Gateway of Pain

The price of every beauty in this world is in proportion to its quality, even although the payment of the price exacted may be long deferred or may be made in such an intricate and remote form that its connection with the result is overlooked.

As the greatest thing which lovers can give each other is a child, and as none in the world are so great as lovers, the price exacted by Nature for the child of loving and sensitive people is correspondingly heavy.

This statement may apparently conflict with the idea that the joy of bearing a child to the beloved is a woman’s consummation of happiness; yet it does not conflict, because of the deeper truth that the supremest happiness is mysteriously intermingled with self-sacrifice. A young woman whose character is sufficiently beautiful and sensitive to know the highest joys of motherhood—the full delights of human existence and love—will also be sensitive to the varied pains which motherhood will bring. Indeed, in this respect, the poet’s saying that “the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers is always the first to be pricked by the thorn” is essentially true.

The radiance of the highest form of motherhood is that of the transfigured saint, hallowed by suffering comprehended and endured, transmuted into a service beyond and above the lower desires of self.

For long, indeed for the many millions of years during which she has shown a motherhood comparable with that of human beings,[2] Nature has essentially trapped and tricked the mother into her motherhood. All the woodland and jungle creatures, the deer or the tiger, the rabbit or the squirrel, grow up through their brief adolescence into a partial consciousness of delight in themselves and reach the phase of their development in which their own desires urge them to unite with each other. One can scarcely believe that they are conscious of the resulting parenthood which will become a physical fact at a later date, although the training of her cubs by a woodland mother undoubtedly does include handing on, through some speechless communication, of some actual instruction. A similar blind parenthood, but in addition coerced, has for many thousands of years been characteristic of a large portion of the human race. Even to-day motherhood is too often blind: the young girl delighting in herself and the fairness of her own body, conscious of the power she wields in social life as a beautiful and attractive creature whom older people pet and please and young men place upon a pedestal, is urged by this natural self-centred delight into accepting through flattery the enjoyment of herself by some chosen mate; and the later consequences of motherhood are then faced either in amazed astonishment or in open revolt.

Earlier civilizations often dealt with the excessive births resulting from blind or coerced parenthood by destroying the children as infants after birth. This was done directly, and often by her leading citizens, in Greece (one of the highest forms of civilization ever attained) and still infanticide direct or indirect goes on among all the populous races of the world. Where the value placed on the mother’s mental and physical suffering is low, one may still see motherhood, not as a fine, voluntary and glorious act of self-sacrifice from the highest possible motives of love and service directly to the beloved, and indirectly to the race, but as the exploitation of a trapped and helpless sacrifice.

Mothers will say that their babies are their greatest joys; one may ask, therefore, how I can use the word “sacrifice” in connection with motherhood. The use of the word is just, and based on truths too generally concealed by those who know them, and far too generally unknown by those who ought to know them. Ignorance of their extent has made men callous, indifferent or ribald towards the profound sacrifices of motherhood.

Few there be, however, who do not know of the agonizing torments of actual birth. The Bible is read aloud in churches, and in its wording there is some recognition of the existence of this agony, although based upon earlier and simpler civilizations in which the women were probably better cared for and better fitted for motherhood than the majority of women are to-day. Following biblical tradition, the memory of the agony of birth is generally portrayed as being wiped out by the supreme joy in the child which follows. To-day, however, this effacement of the anguish is by no means universal, and the abiding horror of the birth is so great that not a few women refuse to bear another child. Then men, who cannot even imagine the experience of child-bearing, denounce such a mother, rate her and hold her up to derision. How little do they realize that in her they may see Nature’s working of the laws of evolution (see p.