As Mr. John Burns said to our first Infant Mortality Conference in Great Britain in 1907, "Let us dignify, purify and glorify motherhood by every means in our power." Evidently this can only be done through marriage, which is in its very essence an institution for the dignifying of motherhood. But a biological writer cannot distinguish as a theologian can between legal and extra-legal motherhood. He may declare that motherhood is hideously illegitimate when it is forced upon a wife married to an inebriate degenerate. He may accept marriage with all his heart as an institution which for him has natural sanctions millions of years older than any Church or State or mankind itself. But for him as a student of life all motherhood must be guarded as such--even if it be guarded in such a fashion that it can never recur, which is our duty to the feeble-minded mother. If there be any reader who is unacquainted with M. Maeterlinck's "Life of the Bee," let him or her study that instructive book. Let him ask why the queen is the End of the hive, why all is for her. Let him ask whether the natural law upon which this depends--the law that all individuals are mortal--does not apply to all races, even our own, and perhaps he will come to agree that the rights of mothers are the oldest and deepest and most necessary of any rights that can be named. And the recognition and granting of them--as they must necessarily be recognized and granted in every living race that depends upon motherhood--is even more imperative in our case than in any other, since human motherhood makes more demands upon the individual than any other. By our constitution we human beings must devote more of our energies to the Future than any other race. But it is a Future better worth working for than any of theirs. CHAPTER XX WOMEN AND ECONOMICS It will be evident that the writer of the foregoing chapter must have something to say on the question of women and economics, but though what must be said seems to me to be very important, it can be stated at no great length. If we turn to the most widely-read and applauded of the feminist books on this subject, _Women and Economics_, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, we are by no means encouraged to find it stated in the first chapter that woman's present economic inferiority to man is not due to "any inherent disability of sex." Wherever Mrs. Gilman may be right, here the biologist knows that she is wrong. The argument has been fully stated in earlier pages, and need not here be restated. But we shall not be surprised if a premise which denies any natural economic disadvantage of women leads to more than dubious conclusions. Only a few pages later, Mrs. Gilman refers to the argument that the economic dependence of women upon their husbands is defensible on the ground that they perform the duties of motherhood, and the following is her comment thereon: