I do not mean by this that we should, scorning the aid of science, return to natural childbirth, and let its pangs scare off the weaklings and the cowards. In this matter the charges of our critics are conflicting. They condemn us for having sought the aid of science to mitigate our suffering, and in the same breath tell us that a return to natural child-bed will bring back a primitive exhilaration and freedom from pain lost for thousands of years. I do not believe that for any comparatively civilized race, any race really worthy the name of man, childbirth has ever been painless. The upright position, held by eighteenth-century divines to be a source of pride in man, was the first injustice to women. Nor do I believe that the sufferings of modern women are any worse or their confinements any more difficult than those of women in the past. They are more closely observed and the difficulties known, and, where skill is available, the dangerous ones are less likely to be fatal. In the past the fragile woman died, or continued ailing, unobserved by a doctor and afraid to complain. People who live and breed in a state of nature are by no means so healthy and vigorous as our modern Rousseaus would have us believe: more children die than survive, and those who are left have physical defects and deformities which could have been remedied by knowledge and care. These and the ravages of smallpox and other diseases, and the deformities due to the natural accidents of life unmitigated by medical care, produce far more ugliness than the mark of an obstetric instrument on temple or forehead. Then, again, youth passes more quickly. The men and women we see in modern life, still reasonably young and fresh with rounded faces and teeth stopped or supplemented by art, would in a more primitive community be dead, or else crouching useless and despised, toothless and with sunken cheeks by the fireside of their sons and daughters.