Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/187

Rh of Procrustes was no myth; we have it in full working activity at this present time.

We come now to the third and most important point, the physical results of the educational strain in relation to maternity. On this head we will take Dr. Withers-Moore as our guide, in his speech made at the British Association on the 11th of August. The pith of his position is in this sentence, "Bacon's mother (intellectual as she was) could not have produced the 'Novum Organum,' but she, perhaps she alone, could and did produce Bacon." The same may be said of Goethe's mother. She could not have written "Faust," but she formed and molded and influenced the man who did. In almost all the histories of great men it is the mother, and not the father, whose influence and teaching are directly traceable; and it is a remark as trite as the thing is common, that great men do not often produce great sons, but almost all great men have notable mothers. As the "Oxford tutor," quoted by Dr. "Withers-Moore, said, "A man's fate depends on the nursing—on the mother, not the father. The father has commonly little to do with the boy till the bent is given, and the foundation of character laid. All depends on the mother." And this means not only her moral influence, but the actual shaping and molding force of her physical condition reacting on his. Following this are the opinions of experts and philosophers who have given time and thought to the subject; and in all the authorities quoted—fourteen in number—there is the same note of warning against overstudy in girls who are one day to be mothers. It is an unwelcome doctrine to those who desire above all things to be put on an absolute equality with men; who desire to do man's special work, while leaving undone their own; who will not recognize the limitations of sex nor the barriers of Nature; who shut their eyes to the good of society and the evil which may be done by individuals; and who believe that all who would arrest a movement fraught with danger to the whole are actuated by private motives of a base kind, and are to be treated as enemies willfully seeking to injure, rather than as friends earnestly desirous of averting injury. Dr. Withers-Moore's summary of the whole question bearing on the physical condition of women as mothers is this:

Excessive work, especially in youth, is ruinous to health, both of mind and body; excessive brain-work more surely so than any other. From the eagerness of woman's nature, competitive brain-work among gifted girls can hardly but be excessive, especially if the competition be against the superior brain-weight and brain-strength of man. The resulting ruin can be averted—if it be averted at all—only by drawing so largely upon the woman's whole capital stock of vital force and energy as to leave a remainder quite inadequate for maternity. The Laureate's "sweet girl graduate in her golden hair" will not have in her the fulfillment of his later aspiration— "May we see, as ages run. The mother featured in the son." The human race will have lost those who should have been her sons. Bacon,