Perhaps it may be permitted to close with a personal reminiscence which, at any rate, bears on the genesis of this chapter. Some nine years ago when I was resident-surgeon to the Edinburgh Maternity Hospital, I proposed to get up a concert for the patients on Boxing Day, and on asking permission of the distinguished obstetrician who was in supreme charge, was met with the question, "Do they deserve it?" After several seconds there slowly dawned the fact which I knew but had long forgotten, that the mothers in the large ward where the music was proposed, were all unmarried, and finally I answered, "I don't know." Nor do I know to this day, and though the answer was given in weakness and in a disconcerted voice, I doubt whether any wiser one could be framed. We all know what desert means, and merit and credit, until we begin to think and study: and we end by discovering that we do not know what, in the last analysis, these terms mean. But, at any rate, these women,--one of them, I remember, was a child of fourteen--were mothers, and whatever favoured their convalescence unquestionably made for the survival of their babies. It might have been argued that if the patients did not deserve music, they did not deserve the air and light and food and skill and kindness with which they were being restored to health. But it is not a question of deserts. These women were mothers. If they should not have been, they should not have been, and if the blame was theirs, they were blameworthy. But mothers they were, with the duties of mothers to perform, and therefore with the rights of mothers. They got their concert and were all the better for the remarkably indifferent music of which it consisted, as such concerts commonly do; and I am only very sorry if any of them argued therefrom that she had nothing in the past to regret. But the spiritual attitude revealed in the question, "Do they deserve it?" is one which must speedily go to its own place. Let us strive to dignify marriage, to educate the young of both sexes for parenthood, to reduce illegitimacy, to reward virtue. But where there is motherhood in being, whether expectant or achieved, we have a duty which is the highest and most sacred of all because it is the Future that we are called upon to serve, and upon us it wholly depends.