view is now seldom expressed in full force: but one remnant of it is to be
found in the lingering impression, that, at any rate, a woman who is not
a mother is of no account; as worthless as a fruitless garden or a barren
fruit-tree. Created only for a certain object, she is of course valueless
unless that object be fulfilled.

But the race must have fathers as well as mothers; and if we look for
evidence of public service in great men, it certainly does not always lie
in leaving children to the republic. On the contrary, the rule has rather
seemed to be, that the most eminent men have left their bequest of service
in any form rather than in that of a great family. Recent inquiries into
the matter have brought out some remarkable facts in this regard.

As a rule, there exist no living descendants in the male line from the
great authors, artists, statesmen, soldiers, of England. It is stated that
there is not one such descendant of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Butler,
Dryden, Pope, Cowper, Goldsmith, Scott, Byron, or Moore; not one of Drake,
Cromwell, Monk, Marlborough, Peterborough, or Nelson; not one of Strafford,
Ormond, or Clarendon; not one of Addison, Swift, or Johnson; not one of
Walpole, Bolingbroke, Chatham, Pitt, Fox, Burke, Grattan, or Canning; not
one of Bacon, Locke, Newton, or Davy; not one of Hume, Gibbon, or Macaulay;
not one of Hogarth or Reynolds; not one of Garrick, John Kemble, or Edmund
Kean. It would be easy to make a similar American list, beginning with
Washington, of whom it was said that "Providence made him childless that
his country might call him Father."

Now, however we may regret that these great men have left little or no
posterity, it does not occur to any one as affording any serious drawback
upon their service to their nation. Certainly it does not occur to us that
they would have been more useful had they left children to the world, but