"La fausse honte qu'out les femmes de laisser voir leur grossesse et tout ce qui a rapport a l'accouchement, les plaisanteries dont on use souvent a l'egard des femmes enceintes, sont un triste signe de la degenerescence et meme de la corruption de notre civilization raffinee. Les femmes enceintes ne devraient pas ce cacher, ni jamais avoir honte de porter un enfant dans leur ventre; elles devraient au contraire en etre fieres. Pareille fierte serait certes bien plus justifiee que celle des beaux officiers paradant sous leur uniforme. Les signes exterieurs de la formation de l'humanite font plus d'honneur a leurs porteurs que les symboles de sa destruction. Que les femmes s'impregnent de plus en plus de cette profonde verite! Elles cesseront alors de cacher leur grossesse et d'en avoir honte. Conscientes de la grandeur de leur tache sexuelle et sociale, elles tiendront haut l'etendard de notre descendance, qui est celui de la veritable vie a venir de l'homme, tout en combattant pour l'emancipation de leur sexe." This passage recalls one of Ruskin's, which is to be found in "Unto This Last":-- "Nearly all labour may be shortly divided into positive and negative labour--positive, that which produces life; negative, that which produces death; the most directly negative labour being murder, and the most directly positive the bearing and rearing of children; so that in the precise degree in which murder is hateful on the negative side of idleness, in that exact degree child-rearing is admirable, on the positive side of idleness." Here is the right comment upon the swaggering display of the means of death and the hiding as if shameful of the signs of life to come. What has Mrs. Grundy to say to this? Will she consider the propriety of urging in future that it is murder and the means of murder, and the organized forces of capital and politics making for murder, that must not be mentioned before children, and must be hidden as shameful from the eyes of men; and while a woman may still glory in her hair, according to that spiritual precept of St. Paul: "But if a woman have long hair it is a glory to her; for her hair is given her for a covering," perhaps she may be permitted even to glory in her motherhood, contemptible as such a notion would doubtless have seemed to the Apostle of the Gentiles. XI EDUCATION FOR MOTHERHOOD