The parent whose sole answer to criticism or remonstrance is “I have a right to do what I like with my own child!” is the only impossible parent.  His moral integument is too thick to be pierced with any shaft however keen.  To him we can only say as Jacques did to Orlando, “God be with you; let’s meet as little as we can.”

But most of us dare not take this ground.  We may not philosophize or formulate, we may not live up to our theories, but we feel in greater or less degree the responsibility of calling a human being hither, and the necessity of guarding and guiding, in one way or another, that which owes its being to us.

We should all agree, if put to the vote, that a child has a right to be well born.  That was a trenchant speech of Henry Ward Beecher’s on the subject of being “born again;” that if he could be born right the first time he’d take his chances on the second.  “Hereditary rank,” says Washington Irving, “may be a snare and a delusion, but hereditary virtue is a patent of innate nobility which far outshines the blazonry of heraldry.”

Over the unborn our power is almost that of God, and our responsibility, like His toward us; as we acquit ourselves toward them, so let Him deal with us.

Why should we be astonished at the warped, cold, unhappy, suspicious natures we see about us, when we reflect upon the number of unwished-for, unwelcomed children in the world;—­children who at best were never loved until they were seen and known, and were often grudged their being from the moment they began to be.  I wonder if sometimes a starved, crippled, agonized human body and soul does not cry out, “Why, O man, O woman—­why, being what I am, have you suffered me to be?”

Physiologists and psychologists agree that the influences affecting the child begin before birth.  At what hour they begin, how far they can be controlled, how far directed and modified, modern science is not assured; but I imagine those months of preparation were given for other reasons than that the cradle and the basket and the wardrobe might be ready;—­those long months of supreme patience, when the life-germ is growing from unconscious to conscious being, and when a host of mysterious influences and impulses are being carried silently from mother to child.  And if “beauty born of murmuring sound shall pass into” its “face,” how much more subtly shall the grave strength of peace, the sunshine of hope and sweet content, thrill the delicate chords of being, and warm the tender seedling into richer life.

Mrs. Stoddard speaks of that sacred passion, maternal love, that “like an orange-tree, buds and blossoms and bears at once.”  When a true woman puts her finger for the first time into the tiny hand of her baby, and feels that helpless clutch which tightens her very heart-strings, she is born again with the new-born child.

A mother has a sacred claim on the world; even if that claim rest solely on the fact of her motherhood, and not, alas, on any other.  Her life may be a cipher, but when the child comes, God writes a figure before it, and gives it value.