160 THE COMMON SENSE OF THE MILK QUESTION 



breast-feeding the results have been very gratifying. 



Those who have read, or seen a performance of, 

 Ibsen's play, The Master Builder, will remember 

 that one of the most touching moments is when Hal- 

 vard Solness, the master builder, teUs that elfin-like 

 creature, Hilda Wangel, the story of the calamity 

 which wrecked his wife's life and made her the pa- 

 thetic wraith of a woman she is. He laments that his 

 wife has lost her vocaition ; for she, too, was a builder. 

 Her vocation was to build up the souls and bodies of 

 little children, and that vocation she has lost. In all 

 the tragedy which enters into this problem of infantile 

 mortality, nothing seems quite as terrible as the 

 lost vocation of motherhood — the fact that so many 

 mothers who ought to be the builders of the souls 

 and bodies of little children, inspirers and nourishers 

 of the race, are giddy human moths flitting around 

 the flame of social pleasiu-e, at one end of society, or 

 industrial slaves, at the other end, bound to wheels. 



That the education of a woman who refuses to nurse 

 her baby has been radically defective is obvious, what- 

 ever the remedy may be. And it is not less obvious, 

 I think, that there is something radically defective 

 in a social system that takes a mother away from the 

 most important service she can possibly render to the 

 state, and makes her care for a machine in a factory; 

 denies her the opportunity to pursue with wisdom and 

 love her vocation as a builder of divine temples of 



