THE EVOLUTION OF A MOTHER 357 



is it unfair to ask if Nature has not lost the trick 

 of making lusty lives ? Is she not trying the new 

 experiment at the risk of blundering the old one, 

 and why cannot she continue the earlier and more 

 brilliant device of making her children knight- 

 errants from the first ? Because brilliance is not 

 her object. Her object is ethical as well as physio- 

 logical ; and though when we look below the 

 surface a purely physiological explanation of the 

 riddle will appear, the ethical gain is not less clear. 

 By curbing them she is educating them, taming 

 them, rescuing them from a wild and lawless life. 

 These roving embryos are mere bandits ; their 

 nature and habits must be changed ; not a sterner 

 race but a gentler race must be born. New words 

 must come into the world — Home, Love, Mother. 

 And these imperceptibly slow drawings together 

 of parent and child are the inevitable preliminaries 

 of the domestication of the Human Race. Re- 

 garded from the ethical point of view there are 

 few things more significant than this reining-in of 

 the world's rampant youth, this tightening the 

 bonds of family life, this most gentle introduction 

 of gentleness into a world cold with motherless 

 children and heartless with childless mothers. 



The personal tie once formed between parent 

 and offspring could never be undone, and from 



