The higher their grade in the scale of organisation and intelligence, the more helpless and incapable young creatures are to feed and to fend for themselves. Kittens are born blind and helpless, but after a few days they see and crawl about. The elephant-mother suckles and safeguards her baby-elephant for two whole years.
Now, were there no purpose in all this—Were it not that such devotion to offspring serves as impulse and spur to the evolution and development of faculty in parents, Nature, in planning the complex human species, would, surely, have endowed the human infant and child with fuller powers of self-preservation.
Were there other functions and aptitudes the exercise whereof would better stimulate and foster human progress, it is inconceivable that children would be, and would be for so long, the helpless, feckless, dependent mortals that they are.
For ten long lunar months, the human babe is part of its mother; homed in the nest of her body, warmed by her warmth, fed by her blood. She breathes for it, digests for it, assimilates for it, exercises for it. For ten further lunar months, it is dependent upon her for the food by which it lives. For nearly a year, save for an inept power of creeping, with but small sense of direction, it requires to be moved and carried everywhere. For years it must be washed, dressed, combed, laid down to sleep at night, got up in the morning, taken for rides or for walks, played with, bidden, chidden; comforted, warmed, cooled; defended, cherished, instructed—in a hundred ways to be gently and progressively adapted to life, by way of a more or less highly-specialised environment. Even when no longer helpless, it must be provided for in the matters of housing, food, clothing, education. It must be instructed in a means of livelihood, and started on its young career.
Among the poorer classes the child depends upon its hard-worked parents for a period varying between twelve and sixteen years. In the professional classes, the young son and daughter are not fully qualified for independent existence before the ages of twenty-three or twenty-five. In ill-health, in brain defect, and in other incapacities, parents must provide for their offspring for life.
And seeing how the demands of the young, and the response and exactions of the parents multiply and amplify proportionally with the higher evolution of both, we are forced to believe that the small survival-value of the child, owing to its native unadaptedness to environment, is part of The Plan, and that it subserves some high and complex purpose in human development.
VII
An essential obligation of Parenthood is, that, in order to fulfil this duly, the parents require to undergo a wholly new and intrinsic adjustment of faculty. Having arrived already at a complex adaptation to a complex civilised environment, in physique and character, in mentality and habit, now, by a revolutionary reversal of their human progress, they must re-adapt to the simplest of all creatures and conditions—a helpless, puling infant in a cradle.