I was one of fourteen children, and my mother had only a little three-roomed cottage near Glasgow. We nearly starved when I was young. I know what the poor suffer at the hands of society.
But it was not society that put fourteen children into that cottage; it was the mother herself. Her own ignorance, helpless ignorance perhaps, was the source of her children’s misery. The most for which society can be blamed concerning that family is in tolerating such a plague-spot of ignorance in its midst. Nor is this pestilential ignorance by any means only confined to the financially poor.
This country, and nearly all the world, has innumerable homes in which the seed of revolution is sown in myriads of minds from the moment they are conceived. Revolted, horror-stricken mothers bear children whose coming birth they fear.
A starved, stunted outlook is stamped upon their brains and bodies in the most intimate manner before they come into the world, so oriented towards it that they must run counter to the healthy, happy constructive stream of human life.
What wonder at the rotten conditions of our population when these are common experiences of the mothers of our race:—
For fifteen years I was in a very poor state of health owing to continual pregnancy. As soon as I was over one trouble it was started all over again.[10]
Again:—
During pregnancy I suffered much. When at the end of ten years I determined that this state of things should not go on any longer.