children, to have, instead, children of their own? The women who are incapable of mothering their own children could then be trained to refrain from bearing them. Ellen Key (in her _Century of the Child_, and elsewhere) has advocated for all young women a year of compulsory "service," analogous to the compulsory military service imposed in most countries on young men. During this period the girl would be trained in rational housekeeping, in the principles of hygiene, in the care of the sick, and especially in the care of infants and all that concerns the physical and psychic development of children. The principle of this proposal has since been widely accepted. Marie von Schmid (in her _Mutterdienst_, 1907) goes so far as to advocate a general training of young women in such duties, carried on in a kind of enlarged and improved midwifery school. The service would last a year, and the young woman would then be for three years in the reserves, and liable to be called up for duty. There is certainly much to be said for such a proposal, considerably more than is to be said for compulsory military service. For while it is very doubtful whether a man will ever be called on to fight, most women are liable to be called on to exercise household duties or to look after children, whether for themselves or for other people. FOOTNOTES: [1] It is not, of course, always literally true that each parent supplies exactly half the heredity, for, as we see among animals generally, the offspring may sometimes approach more nearly to one parent, sometimes to the other, while among plants, as De Vries and others have shown, the heredity may be still more unequally divided. [2] It should scarcely be necessary to say that to assert that motherhood is a woman's supreme function is by no means to assert that her activities should be confined to the home. That is an opinion which may now be regarded as almost extinct even among those who most glorify the function of woman as mother. As Friedrich Naumann and others have very truly pointed out, a woman is not adequately equipped to fulfil her functions as mother and trainer of children unless she has lived in the world and exercised a vocation. [3] "Were the capacities of the brain and the heart equal in the sexes," Lily Braun (_Die Frauenfrage_, page 207) well says, "the entry of women into public life would be of no value to humanity, and would even lead to a still wilder competition. Only the recognition that the entire nature of woman is different from that of man, that it signifies a new vivifying principle in human life, makes the women's movement, in spite of the misconception of its enemies and its friends, a social revolution" (see also Havelock Ellis, _Man and Woman_, fourth edition, 1904, especially Ch. XVIII).