To such degree the doctrine of Expedience and Self-for-Self-solely has spread that there are women who seek now to escape wholly the natural pangs of childbirth. Such persuade their doctors to induce labour a month or more before term; in order that the smaller-sized infant may be born with less discomfort to themselves. Others restrict their diet or abstain from certain foods, in order that the babe, starved thus and ill-nourished before birth, shall be soft and frail and easier of delivery. Dread of pain at whatsoever cost to the future of a human being--and that being their own child--actuates these unnatural and pusillanimous practices. It is becoming a vogue for expectant mothers of the wealthier classes to enter Maternity-Homes, where, in luxurious surroundings, they are enabled, under spinal anæsthesia (Twilight Sleep), to conclude their mother-function without suffering or inconvenience; lying in a torpor of crass insensibility while the greatest of Human Events is taking place in them. Meantime, the sensitive infant-body is dosed with the powerful drug circulating in the maternal blood. But--whither is all this trending? Can we believe that true intelligence and progress consist in grasping greedily all the pleasures and the privileges to be had from life, and basely shirking all the hardships? Can we believe that--suffering and effort being the laws alike of Life and Progress, and the rungs whereby we have climbed the Evolutionary ladder--we can continue to climb when, with short-sighted selfishness, we shall have stripped the ladder of its rungs? The humane use of chloroform duly assuages the worst pangs. While the fine courage, fortitude and sweetness wherewith the soul of woman fares forth naturally upon her Great Adventure, to meet this the Apotheosis of human pain, prove and still further enhance her nobility. Even weak and flimsy women rise to greatness at this crisis. Powers they had never glimmered in themselves emerge and armour them, and--be it remembered--leave eternal records upon mind and character; striking spiritual roots still deeper into living function. V With characteristic Feminist materialism, Olive Schreiner lightly dismisses Maternity as a merely "passive" form of labour. Heaven save the mark! Is it passive so to equip a microscopic cell with living human powers and aspirations that, within the space of months, it makes that miraculous pilgrimage of the pre-natal evolutionary ascent whereby it becomes Man? Passive--so to serve for living environment to this developing organism as to supply it with the multiple, complex and diverse elements, material and vital, biological and psychical, required for the manifold needs and adjustments of its evolving life and faculties?