I am avoiding remote ideals as much as possible, but it is important to meet the prejudice which opposes reform along this line. Many people tell us that, if this unnatural dethronement of the mother and invasion of the home are to be the final terms of our present development, they will resist it at every step: on the familiar thin-end-of-the-wedge principle. Our beautiful “home life” must be preserved at all costs. Our “parental instincts” shall not be enfeebled.
Candidly, in what proportion of the real homes of England, as distinct from the home of a fiction-writer, is the life “beautiful”? In what proportion does it not rather present the spectacle of an overburdened mother struggling heroically to live up to her reputation for gentleness under the strain of ill or wayward children and an irritating husband? In what proportion are the beautiful homes of the novel written by spinsters or bachelors, or people who restrict the number of their children, or men whose posthumous biographies do not reveal a very sweet home life? I believe it was Carlyle who originated that fond boast that no nation in the world has a word for “home” like the English. It was certainly Dickens who gave us the most touching pictures of domestic tenderness and happiness. How many mothers of the working and lower middle class do not dread the holidays, when the children threaten to be near them all day? How many are capable of training children? How many do not regard a blow as the supreme moral agency? How
