Such talk of my sex as “freewomen” and of a liberation from the sexual life, as if that could be possible, fills me with impatience. I would not wait to notice it did I not believe that the hurt done to women had been deep and far-reaching. It has increased for them the difficulty of unifying life. And this uncertainty of desire is, as I believe, the modern disease which has worked such havoc in the souls of women. I would like to silence all useless, impious negators; those who, seeking to be clever, really are blinkered, and unable to see the results that would follow from their destructions. The error in all these outcries is the error of blindness, of getting into a condition of confused intellectual excitement, and because some women are dissatisfied and have been unhappy, saying, therefore, and usually with passion, that they would be more satisfied if all the sex were freed from its own duties. As if freedom were ever gained by running away. The intellectual reformer is so very far from understanding the real human needs. There is, for instance, a significant omission in the quotations I have given—no mention is made of the results of all this to the child, and no suggestion is offered except that it should be trained and cared for by experts and apart from its parents. The home is to go because it restricts the liberty of women and will hinder their earning power, as if this were all that had to be considered. I can hardly find a more striking example of how far the apparently simple and elemental things escape the attention of the intellectual reformer. In the society in which we are living, the only use that can be made of modern progressive teaching about the family—the only ounces of practice to be derived from pounds of precept—will lead, as I believe, to a very undesirable course of action. The programme for the abolition of the home has been outlined for us by reformers of both sexes. Communal houses and kitchens, and the intervention of armies of experts, are to solve the problems which now keep women tied in the individual home. The parents are to be supplanted by “born educators.” Successive institutions are planned for the bottle-period, kindergarten, school age, and so on. The children are to stand on visiting relations to the individual home and their parents, while their bodies and souls are to be cared for by specialists. And we are asked to believe that this will be a gain to the child! “It is the trained hand that the baby needs, not mere blood relationship … personal love is too hot an atmosphere for the young soul.”[69] Now, if I wanted a general term to express the state of mind of these reformers, I do seriously think the word _inhuman_ would be as near to it as any. Some people talk as if there were no emotional quality to decide these questions; they are dry-minded and quite unable to grasp the true values in life.