In the most womanly of women also (as in men at a later epoch) there occurs at this period a natural transposition of the parental traits of Altruism and Chivalry to the impersonal plane; moving them to mother and father the world in general, by way of Charity, Philanthropy, Reform. V Is it not waste of power and faculty, is asked, for able and cultured women to permit their development, physical and mental, to adapt to the simple requirements of a nursery? Uncultured and more or less brainless women of an inferior class, it is said, should be adequate, surely, to cope with the minds and the needs of these immature beings. Immature they are, in truth. But they are nevertheless strangely complex; exquisitely sensitive. And they are men and women in the making--or the marring. Behind the eyes of any child that looks at you in dumb and wistful impotence to express itself, to defend itself, to provide and to care for itself, may lie the mind, in bud, of a Shakespeare, of a Newton, of a Shelley; of a Florence Nightingale, a Mrs. Somerville, a Charlotte Brontë. How the most ordinary child, indeed, of cultured parents suffers acutely in feeling, and deteriorates in mind and character under the regime of blundering rebuffs, scoldings and misapprehensions, he meets at every turn in the nursery ruled by a crude, hard woman of the labouring classes! How, when they have grown older in years but are still only young in understanding, all youth suffers from the shallow motherhood that was kind, maybe, and helpful to it in its childhood, but fails it utterly in the stress and difficulties of its teens! True motherhood is the greatest of the Creative Arts; Mother-craft, the most vital and complex of the Sciences. Life has never received more than a tithe of that which Nature destined for it, owing to lack of mother-nurture. Genius has never fruited to full bloom and potence, because the mothers have so seldom realised the greatness of their task. Nearly all the records of childhood that writers have given us are annals of bewildered mental suffering and of moral torture, which have left their evil mark in injured health or warped mentality--not seldom in both. The home, with all the intuitive wisdoms, the powers and sympathies and the maternal ministry of a true mother, is indispensable to the nurture of Individualism, and thereby to the evolution of human character and faculty.