Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/574

 illiterate, uncultivated, perhaps infantile mother watch over the opening faculties of her child and mould its character for good? One cannot trust to maternal instinct and common sense alone in such an important matter. Maternal instinct is a sorry substitute for intelligent judgment, and common sense is very uncommon in an uncultivated mind. There is no more reason why the moulding of the characters of the young should be entrusted to the instinct and common sense of uneducated people, than there is for entrusting any other human pursuit to such guidance. There are, on the contrary, very powerful reasons why the first years of life should be placed under the most highly trained intelligence, the experiences of these years being those that exert the most lasting influence for good or evil in afterlife.

And reflect, gentlemen, on the future of your society? Unless you earnestly, and manfully, and successfully grapple with this question of female education, there can be no lasting social development, and in the absence of development there must come decay. If hereditary transmission be true at all, it applies to mind as well as to body. We may not yet have discovered, we may never discover, the intermediate links in the chain of causation by which the intellectual and moral qualities of parents are transmitted to their children. The fact is, nevertheless, indisputable. And if there be any truth in the belief that intellectual endowments take more after the mother than after the father, the question becomes all the more serious. The child of parents possessing well-developed bodies and minds begins life with faculties and capacities, which, in proper conditions and in due course, grow up to the maturity of manhood or womanhood. Not so with the offspring of a mother whose faculties are infantile and undeveloped. The mental development of the child is speedily arrested, the faculties retaining to the last the inherent weakness of their maternal source—a weakness which will prevent them from ever growing unto a vigorous maturity. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Can the plenitude of intellectual and moral power be reaped as an inheritance from a mother, perhaps a child-mother whose faculties have lain dormant, or, if at all roused to activity, have been arrested in their development almost at the outset? For the sake of posterity, therefore, I entreat you to do what you can to remove one of the greatest blots on your social system.

Let me not be misunderstood. Do not imagine that I mean