While we read and write, play at politics or ping-pong, this woman and myriads like her are doing the essential work of the world. _The worm waits for us as well as for her and them: and in a few years her children and theirs will be Mankind._ We need a prophet to cry aloud and spare not; to tell us that if this is the fate of mothers in the ranks which supply the overwhelming proportion of our children, our nation may number Shakespeare and Newton amongst the glories of its past, and the lands of ancient empires amongst its present possessions, but it can have no future; that if, worshipping what it is pleased to call success, it has no tears nor even eyes for such failures as these, it may walk in the ways of its insensible heart and in the sight of its blind eyes, yet it is walking not in its sleep but in its death, is already doomed and damned almost past recall; and that, if it is to be saved, there will avail not “broadening the basis of taxation,” nor teaching in churches the worship of the Holy Mother and Holy Child, whilst Motherhood is blasphemed at their very doors, but this and this only--the establishment, not in statutes but in the consciences of men and women, of a true religion based upon these perdurable and evident dogmas--that all human life is holy, all mothers and all children, that history is made in the nursery, that the individual dies, that therefore children determine the destinies of all civilisations, that the race or society which succeeds with its mammoth ships and its manufactures but fails to produce men and women, is on the brink of irretrievable doom; that the body of man is an animal, endowed with the inherited animal instincts necessary for self-preservation and the perpetuation of the race, but that, if the possession of this body by a conscious spirit, “looking before and after,” is anything more than a “sport” of the evolutionary forces, it demands that, the blind animal instincts notwithstanding, the desecration of motherhood, the perennial slaughter and injury of children, the casual unconsidered birth of children for whom there is no room or light or air or food, and of children whose inheritance condemns them to misery, insanity or crime, must cease; and that the recurrent drama of human love and struggle reaches its happy ending not when the protagonists are married, but when they join hands over a little child that promises to be a worthy heir of all the ages. This religion must teach that the spectacle of a prematurely aged and weary and hopeless mother, which he who runs or rides may see, produced by our rude foreshadowings of civilisation, is an affront to all honest and thoughtful eyes: that where there are no mothers, such as mothers should be, the people will assuredly perish, though everything they touch should turn to gold, though science and art and philosophy should flourish as never before. I believe that history, rightly read, teaches these tremendous lessons.