race is unsocial it will perish anyway.  If it has not become unsocial—­and it does not display any such tendency, but only the use of such impulses in mistaken directions—­then a group necessity like reproduction can be met.  Whatever is required of the individual will become “moral” and “patriotic”—­i.e., it will be wreathed in the imperishable sentiments which group themselves around socially necessary and hence socially approved acts everywhere and always.

In whatever races finally survive, the women of good stock as well as poor—­perhaps eventually the good even more than the poor—­will reproduce themselves.  Because of our ideals of individual liberty, this may not be achieved by taboo, ignorance or conscription for motherhood.  But when it is found to be the personal interest to bear children, both as a means of complete physical and mental development and as a way of winning social approval and esteem, it will become as imperative for woman to fulfil the biological function to which she is specialized as it was under the old system of moral and taboo control.  The increasing emphasis on the necessity of motherhood for the maintenance of a normal, health personality, and the growing tendency to look upon this function as the greatest service which woman can render to society, are manifest signs that this time is approaching.  There is little doubt that woman will be as amenable to these newer and more rationalized mores as human nature has always been to the irrationally formed customs and traditions of the past.

To ignore the female specialization involved in furnishing the intramaternal environment for three children, on an average, to the group, is simply foolish.  If undertaken at maturity—­say from twenty-two to twenty-five years of age—­and a two-year interval left between the three in the interest of both mother and children, it puts woman in an entirely different relation toward extra-reproductive activities than man.  It does imply a division of labour.

In general, it would seem socially expedient to encourage each woman to have her own three children, instead of shifting the burden upon the shoulders of some other.  If such activities of nursing and caring for the very young can be pooled, so much the better.  Doubtless some women who find them distasteful would be much more useful to society at other work.  But let us not disregard fundamentals.  It is obviously advantageous for children of normal, able parents to be cared for in the home environment.  In a biologically healthy society the presumption must be that the average woman has some three children of her own.  Since this obviously includes nurses and governesses, we see at once the futility of the oft-proposed class solution of hiring single women to care for the children of the fortunate.  If such a servant is undesirable, she is not hired; if normal, in a biologically healthy society she would have her own children.

The female handicap incident to reproduction may be illustrated by the case of Hambletonian 10 mentioned in Chapter II.  We saw that a female could not have borne the hundredth part of his colts.  This simply means that the effort or individual cost of impressing his characters upon the new generation is less than one one-hundredth that required of a female.