The only possibility of endurance for such nurses will be to give the children only that general kindness that is not enough for them. Love they will not be able to give. No word is more abused than love, not least by the interpreters of Christianity, who attenuate it into a wafer for the nourishment of all, under the name of universal love. But there is no such thing as universal love, or love of humanity; there cannot be such a thing; it would be as much a contradiction in terms as a quadrilateral triangle. There is a charity which pours itself out like oil upon all wounds; there is sympathy in joy and sorrow between individuals; mutual help and mutual responsibility in society; a common feeling of rejoicing or suffering with our nation or with humanity at great moments. But all love from one human being to another which deserves that name, is in the highest degree individual; it is a selection, a separation. If it is not this, it is nothing. A woman chooses her children even when she chooses their father; and she often shows her preference among the children themselves. An individually developed mother rightly asserts her privilege of not loving all her children equally. She gives them all the affection they need in the same degree; she is capable of the same broad justice towards them all, but she has for one of them a more personal love than for the rest. The profound tragedy in the relations between parents and children is precisely this, that this relationship is often as passionate as personal love, but without the latter’s understanding; that it involves the claims of a great emotion, but not the power that an individual feeling has of becoming intensified in the same degree as the claim is increased. Individual love is alone sufficient for a child’s needs. An “elected mother” may perhaps once, or several times, be able to feel such a love for one or more of the children entrusted to her. But she cannot have this love for all of them, and she will herself be torn asunder when one after the other the children she loves are taken from her. The mothers for the State institution must furthermore be found by thousands, if the whole of society is to be constructed on this plan. And then it will be with them as with the clergy, who in the earliest congregations were called by the Holy Spirit, but afterwards by the congregation. It would be more and more rarely the proved personal aptitude and inner necessity that would decide the choice, but in its place the accepted standard of professional training. It is by means of these professional mothers, as is now the opinion, that children would have better conditions of life than in their own homes, where, in spite of all shortcomings, personal responsibility and personal affection render imperfection in the higher grades of education less dangerous than perfection in a lower grade.