The parents have not only to train their children:  it is of at least equal importance that they should train themselves.  It is desirable that children, as they grow up, should be alive to this necessity, and consciously assist in the process, since they are in closer touch with a new world of activities to which their more lethargic parents are often blind and deaf.  For every fresh stage in our lives we need a fresh education, and there is no stage for which so little educational preparation is made as that which follows the reproductive period.  Yet at no time—­especially in women, who present all the various stages of the sexual life in so emphatic a form—­would education be more valuable.  The great burden of reproduction, with all its absorbing responsibilities, has suddenly been lifted; at the same time the perpetually recurring rhythm of physical sex manifestations, so often disturbing in its effect, finally ceases; with that cessation, very often, after a brief period of perturbation, there is an increase both in physical and mental energy.  Yet, too often, all that one can see is that a vacuum has been created, and that there is nothing to fill it.  The result is that the mother—­for it is most often of the mother that complaint is made—­devotes her own new found energies to the never-ending task of hampering and crushing her children’s developing energies.  How many mothers there are who bring to our minds that ancient and almost inspired statement concerning those for whom “Satan finds some mischief still”!  They are wasting, worse than wasting, energies that might be profitably applied to all sorts of social service in the world.  There is nothing that is so much needed as the “maternal in politics,” or in all sorts of non-political channels of social service, and none can be better fitted for such service than those who have had an actual experience of motherhood and acquired the varied knowledge that such experience should give.  There are numberless other ways, besides social service, in which mothers who have passed the age of forty, providing they possess the necessary aptitudes, can more profitably apply themselves than in hampering, or pampering, their adult children.  It is by wisely cultivating their activities in a larger sphere that women whose chief duties in the narrower domestic sphere are over may better ensure their own happiness and the welfare of others than either by fretting and obstructing, or by worrying over, their own children who are no longer children.  It is quite true that the children may go astray even when they have ceased to be children.  But the time to implant the seeds of virtue, the time to convey a knowledge of life, was when they were small.  If it was done well, it only remains to exercise faith and trust.  If it was done ill, nothing done later will compensate, for it is merely foolish for a mother who could not educate her children when they were small to imagine that she is able to educate them when they are big.