There is no secret and infallible guide to natural instinct, any more than there is to the tendency of civilisation. Both may lead the individual as well as the race astray with regard to the goal which both, consciously or unconsciously, are seeking: higher forms of life. In motherliness, humanity has attained what is at present its most perfect form of life within the race taken as a whole. Motherhood is a natural balance between the happiness of the individual and of the whole, between self-assertion and self-devotion, between sensuousness and soulfulness. A great love, a power of creation amounting to genius, may in solitary instances attain the same unity. But the immense advantage of the mother is that, with her child in her arms,—without being conscious of a struggle and without belonging to the favoured exceptions,—she possesses that unity between happiness and duty which mankind as a whole will attain in other departments only after endless toil and trouble. But if this personal self-assertion, this personal joy in woman’s consciousness be gradually released from its connection with the child, then this unity will be broken up. An incidental displacement of it was necessary; for the liberation of woman—like every other movement of the kind—involved precisely the disturbance of that equilibrium which had been produced by the pressure of superior force and by hereditary inertness, an artificial equilibrium, which could be maintained only by pressure on one side and inertness on the other. It was necessary that daughters should rise up against their fathers’ ideals of wives; sisters against the brothers’ share of inheritance, which had increased so greatly to their cost; mothers against the view of their duties which kept them within the sphere of female animals. They must carry through that emancipation which has already made it possible for them to use their brains—not only their hearts—in fulfilling their eternal mission: that of fostering and preserving new lives.