That most orphan asylums are now managed by skilled and able people is only a mitigation of the wrong. A substitute is thus offered for mother-love—something just as good ❦ But the eternal fact remains: There is no substitute for mother-love. God is that jealous of it that He supplies nothing to equal it. ¶ We can never have a noble race of men until we have a noble race of mothers. And in order to be a noble woman, this woman must be economically free ❦ Wonderful changes have come to the world within a few years. For a woman not to wed, no longer carries a penalty. The term “old maid” has now no terrors. Spinsterhood is an achievement, not a disgrace. ¶ The unmarried woman between forty and fifty is probably a self-supporting woman. And this responsibility makes her the mental superior of her married sister who looks to a male man for food, clothing and protection from the storm. Yet because a woman has not seen fit to marry is no reason for assuming that the cosmic urge is dead. And just remember this, that no woman ever lived who couldn’t marry some man if she wanted to. She will not marry because she is not content to accept any old thing. ¶ It is always a question of what man. And as women more and more are able to care for themselves—and this is the one sure economic tendency of the times—they will more and more cease being willing to swear to honor, love and obey one man for ninety-nine years. Yet the mother instinct will not die on that account. The race will not perish ❦ The independence of women will make them better mothers. Their children will be stronger in brain and body, cleaner, abler, firmer in the ability to discover and decide for the right. But Free Motherhood must be respected. ¶ The word “illegitimate” is now pretty nearly banished, since we have discovered that God smiles upon the freeborn child as upon none other. William the Conqueror, Theodoric the First, Erasmus, Jean Dunois, Leonardo da Vinci, the Empress Josephine, Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and scores of other intellectual kings that might be named, have redeemed the “small and select class” from the unmanicured finger of shame ❦ We no longer look askance upon the offspring; as for the father we smile away his “past” as a mere peccadillo, and he becomes a deacon in the church—a pillar of society. The mother, however, Society still spits upon as one polluted. ¶ This will not always be so. The very fact that I am now writing on the subject, and that several hundred thousand gentle men and women—the very intellectual pick of the world—will read my words, argues progress. Others, too, are writing. The world is changing—all things are being made new ❦ The crime of orthodoxy is its lack of faith. It believes too little. What we want is not a belief in one “immaculate conception,” but a fixed and firm faith in the fact that whenever and wherever a mother holds in her arms a babe, hugging it to her heart, crooning to it a lullaby, there is God.