To plant out the shivering, exquisitely sensitive seedling, the human Babe, in the chill, communal atmosphere of a Crèche or other institution, is as inhuman a social crime as it is an inhuman social crime to defraud its mother of her highest evolutionary impulse and function in the nurture of her little one—a responsibility she has incurred, a privilege she has earned by right of her maternity.
In her nursery, the mind of woman opens new windows of illumination, glimpses new vistas of thought and emotion, higher and lovelier apprehensions of the profounder meanings of Life. In her nursery, her eyes learn tenderness, her voice sweet modulation, her speech new purity and fondness.
In good and happy homes where young persons, in place of being banished to schools, grow up in the natural bracing and inspiring atmosphere of parental influence and affection, Sex evolves new issues, in those attractions and sympathies of its Contrasting Traits which are evoked by the relations of mother and son, of father and daughter, of brother and sister.
Under modern conditions, in which children and young persons renew intermittent acquaintance merely with parents and brothers and sisters during brief holiday visits—returning home, with every added term of absence, more and more strangers to their kin, their personalities and interests increasingly detached from those of the home circle—such potent and inspiring developments of sex are vanishing.
A wide gulf, truly, separates from their fathers these modern self-centred, self-opinionated young sportswomen and over-academised girls. The charming filial relation, engendering new and tender sex-amenities in the daughter's hero-worship and reliance on the manhood of her sire, in the father's protective chivalry and recruital of his youth in the company and interests of his young daughter, is waning toward extinction. The vast majority of fathers feel dismally constrained, indeed, and out of countenance in the presence of their girls—so smart and sophisticated, so superior, critical and self-sufficing are our latter-day school and college-maidens. For the most part, their own daughters are the last among womenkind to whom men turn, to reap something of the freshness and fairness of the younger generation they have sown and laboured for.
While the up-to-date mother aspires to no higher or more beautiful place in her boy's life and affections than that of "good chum!"
CHAPTER III
THE EXTINCTION OF SEX IN ADOLESCENCE