If the facile writers of those endless newspaper articles on the degeneracy of modern women really wish to make good their case, they had better abandon their foolish complaints as to women’s inability to manage the spinning-wheel or preserve pickles, and other tasks which the progress of machinery have rendered unnecessary. Let them instead turn their attention for proof of degeneracy to the strange helplessness of middle-class mothers in training their children, and their dread of nursery complications. I know many a woman whose financial ability and capacity for organising almost amounts to genius, who would doubtless not be at a loss in dealing with a burglar, yet who would on no account face the terrors of a longish railway journey in sole charge of her two-year-old child, whilst to ‘take the baby at night’ once in a way during the nurse’s absence from home is a nerve-shattering experience which necessitates at least one day’s complete rest in bed afterwards. ‘To start the nursery again,’ with all its complicated machinery, when the sole hope has got over its teething torments, can walk, feed itself, and generally be companionable, is a prospect before which modern mothers seem to quail. The remedy is to multiply the number of hopes before the nursery has time to be outgrown by Hope No. 1, in fact to keep the nursery going a good many years longer than is nowadays fashionable--though by no means for the unlimited period advised by Father Vaughan and other celibate priests entirely ignorant of nurseries and their exigences! III PARENTHOOD: THE HIGHEST DESTINY ‘O happy husband! happy wife! The rarest blessing Heaven drops down The sweetest treasure in spring’s crown, Starts in the furrow of your life.’ --GERALD MASSEY. Perhaps I may be accused of dealing with marriage in a too flippant manner. Most of the treatises that I have read have erred in the opposite direction and have treated the subject from a tediously transcendental point of view. I have purposely tried to deal with realities, with facts, with matrimony as it really is--I mean as it really appears to me--in this very workaday world, and not as it might be in a glorious ideal world of noble spirits.