Nietzsche, who knew little of love because he knew nothing of woman, and who therefore on this subject says little worthy of attention, has still spoken more profoundly on the subject of parenthood than any contemporary writer. He saw what impurity, what poverty are concealed under the name of marriage. He saw how meretricious, how ignorant education is. In his writings are to be found prophetical and poetical words describing the end aimed at in parenthood, and showing what true parenthood should be. I will that thy victory and thy emancipation shall yearn for a child. Living memorials shalt thou build for thy victory, and for thy emancipation. Thou must build upward to a height beyond thyself. But first I would have thee thyself built with a square foundation, body and soul. See that through thee the race progresses, not continues only. Let a true marriage help thee to this end. A more exalted being must thou create, a being gifted with initiative like a wheel that turns itself. A creative principle shouldst thou create. Marriage: I call marriage the will shared by two, to create the one,--the one that is in itself more than its creators. Reverence for one another, I call marriage; such reverence as is meet for those whose wills are united in this one act of will. CHAPTER II THE UNBORN RACE AND WOMAN'S WORK There are few factors in the life of the present in which the dualism between theory and practice is greater and more unconscious than in questions concerning woman. The protagonists of the feminist movement are in many cases sturdily Christian. They protest with vigour against the idea that they could have any share in the sort of emancipation of personality that includes freedom for all the powers and activities of the personality. Individualism, and the assertion of self are for them degrading words with a sinful significance. That the emancipation of women is practically the greatest egoistic movement of the nineteenth century, and the most intense affirmation of the right of the self that history has yet seen, they have no suspicion. Freedom for the powers and the personality of woman have never appeared to them except as an ideal struggle for justice, as a noble victory to be won. In its deepest meaning this is as true of every other effort at self-affirmation, the end of which is the recognition of the right of human personality to the full development of capacities in a sphere of freedom, where responsibility belongs to the self alone. But just as every other such affirmation of the individual self, of a class, of a race, easily falls into an unjustifiable egoism, so with the emancipation of woman.