Already the educated—nay, even the uneducated—mother of the present day makes use in her care of children of double the brain power but of only half the muscular force that her grandmother employed. She knows better how to differentiate between the essential and the unessential; she can by circumspection obviate much toil and trouble. And when all mothers receive the practical and theoretical training in nursing children and the sick, which must be their form of universal service corresponding to the military service of men, then the problem will be even more simplified in the direction of the impersonal and more and more extended in the direction of the personal. The mother must use her intelligence and her imagination, her artistic sense and her feeling for nature, her instincts in physiology and psychology, in order to provide the child with the conditions under which it may develop itself in the best and freest way; but, on the other hand, she must beware of—remoulding the child. She will in this way gain much time which at present is wasted in unnecessary attentions and harmful education. But avoidance of the personal charge is impossible to the mother without incurring the dishonour of a fugitive. There are a number of women who think that the feeling of motherhood can exist independently of a mother’s care and responsibility for the child, and that the latter may therefore be taken charge of by the community and still retain the treasure of motherly and fatherly affection. These women can never have reflected that, with human beings as with animals, parental affection is formed by care and self-sacrifice; that it rises with these; that the less demand is made upon it, the poorer it becomes. When a father for a time takes the place of the mother, he becomes as tender as she; when a sick child exhausts its mother’s strength, it is nearest her heart; and as the child grows up, her affection becomes less spontaneously intimate, although instead it may increase through personal intercourse. State care of young children would mean a withering of the intimacy of parental affection. The tenderness evoked by the child’s bodily presence shows, better than any other feeling, the unity of soul and senses. Without the sensuous presence, the psychical impression loses its power, as does the bodily impression without the psychical. The instinct of motherhood, like all others, has been formed through constancy of external conditions. It is acquired through definite sensations and associations of ideas. When certain of these emotions, at first conscious, became unconscious, and were then performed by lower nerve-centres, the higher nerve-centres, which had formerly been occupied, were set at liberty for higher uses. But if the sensations and associations of ideas, which originally formed the instinct, are weakened, then the instinct loses its automatic sureness. What worked easily, “of its own accord,” as popular speech rightly has it,