Human being and woman, citizen and personality—less than this the social mother of the future cannot be. She has destroyed all bridges which might take her back to the womanly ideal of older times: the powerful but narrow-minded housekeeper, the thoughtlessly devoted wife. But at the same time she has nothing in common with the short-sighted woman’s rights woman, who takes pride in being a restless working-machine or a specialist rewarded by diplomas but otherwise half-educated. She has learned something from the older as well as from the new type. But she resembles neither, for only completeness of life is to her the meaning of life. Many a little girl, leaning over her history book, must have been indignant at the way humanity used to be reckoned in past times: so many men—“besides women and children”! It was long before women began to be counted at all, and they are still only half-counted. Children are still under “besides.” But some day we may perhaps have come so far in our feeling for what is coming on, that we shall invert the order and reckon “so many children—besides women and men.” We shall then give evidence in our treatment of children of our reverence for these profoundly wise and mysterious beings, whom we never fathom. We shall see behind the figure of every child the infinite line of past generations, before it the equally endless ranks of those to come. We shall remember in our actions that the child is the sum of these dead ones, the hope of those unborn. We shall let the child reveal itself and receive its revelations with a discretion at present unsuspected. The tragedies of the childish soul are still waiting for their Shakespeare, although the child is already appearing in literature as never before. And here, as ever, literature is the precursor of the great movement of liberty which shall bring the children’s declaration of rights and make an end of the spiritual and bodily ill-treatment of children, which must appear to the future as monstrous as negro slavery does to us. It may be that children too will have their right to vote, as well as their own representatives in the legislature and in the courts of law.[6] It should be the collective mothers who would thus finally liberate the children of society. It will then be seen that the octave of the child’s soul was just as indispensable as that of woman or man, in order that the great harmony of humanity might be complete. When this happens the third kingdom will have arrived, whose Messiah the age now awaits. But it is not in the lap of collective motherliness that he will be borne. Again and again saviours will be born to humanity. But always of some young woman with forehead pure as a lily and deep eyes. And Bethlehem will always be there, where a young mother kneels in prayer by her child’s cradle. CHAPTER VIII FREE DIVORCE