Here, again, our success depends upon
recognizing the psychical factor in that which to the vulgar eye is
purely physiological--not that there is anything vulgar about physiology
except to the vulgar eye.
For myself, the phrase "the expectant mother" is much more than useful,
though in speaking it has made all the difference scores of times. It is
beautiful because it suggests the ideal of every pregnancy--that the
expectant mother shall indeed _expect_, look forward to the life which
is to be. Her motto in the ideal world or even in the world at the
foundations of which we are painfully working, will be those words of
the Nicene creed which the very term must recall to the mind--_Expecto
resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi saeculi_.
Let any one who fancies that these pre-occupations with mere language
are trivial or misplaced here take the opportunity of addressing two
drawing-rooms under similar conditions, on some such subject as the care
of pregnancy from the national point of view. Let him in the one case
speak of the pregnant woman, and so forth, and in the other of the
expectant mother. He will be singularly insensitive to his audience if
he does not discover that sometimes a rose by any other name is somehow
the less a rose. The more fools we perhaps, but there it is, and in the
most important of all contemporary propaganda, which is that of the
re-establishment of parenthood in that place of supreme honour which is
its due, even such "literary" debates as these are not out of place.
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