No one can attach more than its due importance to woman's function of
choosing the fathers of the future; rejecting the unworthy and selecting
the worthy for this greatest of human duties. It would be a most serious
difficulty for those who hold such a creed if it were that a girl's
taste and judgment could be trusted, if at all, only some years after
she had reached physical maturity for motherhood. It may be that in the
present conditions of girls' education, such right direction of this
choice as occurs, is just as likely to occur at the earlier age as at
any later one, when indeed it may happen that considerations more
worldly and prudential, less generally natural and eugenic, may come to
have greater weight. One can, therefore, only leave it to the reader's
consideration whether it is not high time that we should so seek to
prepare the girl's mind, that when her body Is ready for marriage her
mind may, if possible, be ready also to guide her towards a worthy
choice which the whole of her future life may ratify, and the life of
her descendants thereafter.
It must be insisted again that this question has many ramifications, and
that not the least important of them are those which concern themselves
with the kinds of disease already referred to. Some enemy of God and man
once invented a phrase about the desirability of young men sowing their
wild oats, and subsequent enemies of life and the good and progress, or
perhaps mere fools, animated gramophones of a cheap pattern, have
repeated and still propagate that doctrine.
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