THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMAN. 173 



of Procrustes was no myth ; we have it in full working activity at this 

 present time. 



We come now to the third and most important point, the physical 

 results of the educational strain in relation to maternity. On this head 

 we will take Dr. "Withers-Moore as our guide, in his speech made at 

 the British Association on the 11th of August. The pith of his posi- 

 tion is in this sentence, " Bacon's mother (intellectual as she was) could 

 not have produced the ' Novum Organum,' but she, perhaps she alone, 

 could and did produce Bacon." The same may be said of Goethe's 

 mother. She could not have written " Faust," but she formed and 

 molded and influenced the man who did. In almost all the histories 

 of great men it is the mother, and not the father, whose influence and 

 teaching are directly traceable ; and it is a remark as trite as the thing 

 is common, that great men do not often produce great sons, but almost 

 all great men have notable mothers. As the " Oxford tutor," quoted 

 by Dr. Withers-Moore, said, "A man's fate depends on the nursing — 

 on the mother, not the father. The father has commonly little to do 

 with the boy till the bent is given, and the foundation of character 

 laid. All depends on the mother." And this means not only her 

 moral influence, but the actual shaping and molding force of her 

 physical condition reacting on his. Following this are the opinions 

 of experts and philosophers who have given time and thought to the 

 subject ; and in all the authorities quoted — fourteen in number — there 

 is the same note of warning against overstudy in girls who are one 

 day to be mothers. It is an unwelcome doctrine to those who de- 

 sire above all things to be put on an absolute equality with men ; 

 who desire to do man's special work, while leaving undone their own ; 

 who will not recognize the limitations of sex nor the barriers of Nature ; 

 who shut their eyes to the good of society and the evil which may be 

 clone by individuals ; and who believe that all who would arrest a 

 movement fraught with danger to the whole are actuated by private 

 motives of a base kind, and are to be treated as enemies willfully seek- 

 ing to injure, rather than as friends earnestly desirous of averting 

 injury. Dr. Withers-Moore's summary of the whole question bearing 

 on the physical condition of women as mothers is this : 



Excessive work, especially in youth, is ruinous to health, hoth of mind and 

 body ; excessive brain-work more surely so than any other. From the eagerness 

 of woman's nature, competitive brain-work among gifted girls can hardly but 

 be excessive, especially if the competition be against the superior brain-weight 

 and brain-strength of man. The resulting ruin can be averted — if it be averted 

 at all — only by drawing so largely upon the woman's whole capital stock of vital 

 force and energy as to leave a remainder quite inadequate for maternity. The 

 Laureate's "sweet girl graduate in her golden hair" will not have in her the 

 fulfillment of his later aspiration — 



" May we see, as ages run, 

 The mother featured in the son." 



The human race will have lost those who should have been her sons. Bacon, 



