Now to me all such talk is the visible sign of the deplorable failure in women’s lives. Feminists tell me that the breaking up of the individual home with the institutional rearing of children will liberate women. By this plan of reform they will be free, able to have children and also to devote themselves to gainful work. They will gain the economic independence for which they are so loudly crying. Motherhood will be but a short interruption in the professional or industrial career—mother-care a superstition of the past. What can I say to show how misplaced and how mischievous is the outlook of those who thus turn away from the long experience of the past? It is not so that the problems of the future can be solved. The past gives us proof enough that woman’s creation, the home, has been her great contribution to civilisation. No transitory needs or seeming personal gains can counterbalance the loss that must come to us as a people from woman’s neglect of positive duties. There has been neglect under industrial conditions. Escape was impossible. And in our homes there has been urgent need for reform. Here I am in agreement with those who discredit the value of the home. I, too, am certain that our family and home life, in many directions, have been as bad as they could be. A radical change is needed, but I hope it will be in the opposite direction from the plan of institutional upbringing of the children, and the substitution of the communal dwelling-house for the individual home. I know well, as every woman must know, that the creating of the right kind of home is no easy task, but one that demands the continuous presence of the mother, with an unceasing giving of herself in body and in soul. And the trouble is that under industrial ideals of restless discontent and of pulling down the barriers, the majority of women have become more and more unfitted for efficient home-making. Of one fact I am certain. Things cannot go on as before. Here is the reason. The supervision of the home and the maintenance of any true form of family life is not compatible with the regular outside occupation of married women. Such a duplication of a woman’s energies can be undertaken only by her using for herself and her work the reserve of physical, mental, and spiritual energy that should be stored and given to her children. To deny this is foolishness. Are women possessed of inexhaustible stores of energy? Do the ordinary rules of arithmetic and subtraction not hold good in their case? It would seem so. For women are maintaining that to divert so large a proportion of their energies in fresh directions will not involve any diminution of the strength available for their own affairs. Women are oddly blind.