What, then, is it in our power to do; and how are we to do it? It may be argued that if the maternal instinct is a thing which cannot be made or acquired, our study of it has little relation to practice. But indeed it is eminently practical. For, in the first place, this priceless possession, this parental instinct and tenderness, is inheritable. We know by observation amongst ourselves that hardness and tenderness are to be found running through families--are things which are transmissible. Let us, then, make parenthood the most responsible, the most deliberate, the most self-conscious thing in life, so that there shall be children born to those who love children, and only to those who love children, to those who have the parental instinct naturally strong, and who will, on the average, transmit a high measure of it to their offspring. In a generation bred on these principles--a generation consisting only of babies who were loved before they were born--there would be a proportion of sympathy, of tender feeling, and of all those great, abstract, world-creating passions which are evolved from the tender emotion, such as no age hitherto has seen. It was necessary to insert this eugenic paragraph because it expresses the central principle of all real reform, as fundamental and all-important as it is unknown to all political parties, and I fear to nearly all philanthropists as well. But, for the present, our immediate concern is the application, if such be possible, of our knowledge of the parental instinct to the education of girls. Being indeed an instinct it can be neither made nor acquired, but, like every other factor of humanity that is given by inheritance, it depends upon the conditions in which it finds itself. Education being the provision of an environment, there is no higher task for the educator than to provide the right environment for the maternal instinct in adolescence. We are to look upon it as at once delicate and ineradicable. These are adjectives which may seem incompatible, yet they may both be verified. Any one will testify that, in a given environment, say that of high school or university or that of the worst types of what is called society, the maternal instinct may then and there, and for that period, become a nonentity in many a girl. Hence we are entitled to say that it is delicate; much more delicate, for instance, than what we have agreed to call the racial instinct, which is far more imperious and by no means so easily to be suppressed.