No less amazing than it is lamentable is the light neglect by the majority of cultured mothers, of their grave maternal obligations. From earliest infancy, they hand over their children, body and soul, to the ignorance, the carelessness, the cruelty (not seldom to the viciousness even), of stranger-women of the uncultured classes; women of whose character and disposition they know nothing, and who are only too often unfitted by nature, by upbringing, and by habit for this most delicate, difficult and important of all human tasks. It is by no means uncommon to find prostitutes, grown too old for a trade that has vitiated every cell and secretion of their bodies (to say nothing of mental vitiation), officiating in the capacity of nursemaid to children of culture. Every child is a new creation, with a highly specialised organisation of mind and of body. For the nurture and best development of these, are required high degrees of intelligence, of understanding and of sympathy in treatment. To realise its idiosyncrasies, constitutional and temperamental, and to adapt to these in its rearing and surroundings, with respect to diet, exercise, play, sleep, moral supervision and discipline, demand intuitive perceptiveness, intelligent discrimination, and practical resource such as no other department of life demands--or is worth. Notwithstanding all this, mothers who can afford to shelve their duty upon paid substitutes abandon the most complex and sensitive, the most beautiful and valuable, and moreover, the most helpless thing in Nature--the mind of a child--to be shaped and coloured, during all the most impressionable years of its development, by persons with neither aptitude nor faculty for this supremely complex and difficult function. In place of so adapting its environment to the child-organism as to enable it, fenced within the tender mother-fold, to enjoy to the full and to develop to the full the lovely, inspiring beliefs and illusions of natural childhood, latter-day mothers now cruelly rob their little ones of this fructifying phase, by prematurely forcing worldly knowledge and distrusts upon them, in precocious adjustment to mature view-points and conditions from which they should be carefully secluded. In that mysterious Mind-department, the Subconsciousness, with its highly sensitised brain-tablets, every smallest happening of a lifetime--scenes, experiences, mental impressions--are photographed, to be stored for ever after as ineffaceable records. And though, perhaps, wholly forgotten, these subconscious records nevertheless colour and influence for ever after every thought and impulse and action. Sometimes they flash up as memories. They can be recalled under hypnotism.