MOTHER LOVE 
341 
Where Zola failed, who can hope to succeed? To 
distinguish between brute and brute: no, dear lady, that task 
I not regretfully relinquish! 
But in "refined" strata? That cock won't fight, 0 thou 
Aspirant to the Sacred Wisdom! It's very often worse; for 
under the anaesthetic, the most delicately-minded ladies of 
high social position and religious repute are apt to pour forth 
floods of filth which would disgust the coarsest harridans of 
slum-land! 
This is the final fact: so long as our life is bound to that of 
the animal and vegetable worlds, so that we are bondslaves 
born to their quite ineradicable habits, so long are we dragged 
back from every flight of fancy or imagination such as would 
break the chains that anchor us to mud. 
The most far-seeing of our prophetically minded writers, 
Aldous Huxley, brands this black fact upon our foreheads. 
The first condition of a "Brave New World" must be the 
dissociation of sexual from reproductive life. The word 
"mother" must be as nauseating to all properly human minds 
as it now is to every one that has contemplated the subject 
with clear vision. 
I know there is an answer to all this; in fact, The Book of 
the Law enables us to take it in our stride. 
But there is another aspect of "mother-love" which is 
urgent, practical, and in no way dependent upon ideal 
considerations. 
What do we find in practice as the immediate consequence 
of this 'sublime', this 'holy' instinct? 
Quite a few species of animals habitually devour their 
offspring; but women "know a trick worth two of that." 
Next witness: Dr. Doughty, who looked after the health of 
Trinity College, Cambridge. 
A swift routine examination: then he tilted his chair 
backwards, thrust his hands deep into his trousers pockets, 
fixed the patient with a glare of ice; then these words