is a silent work going on in the hearts of thoughtful and educated
mothers, which never comes before the public at all, but is silently
spreading and deepening under the surface of our life.

But when all this is thankfully recognized and acknowledged, I still
cannot help questioning whether the mass of educated women have at all
grasped the depth and complexity of the problem with which we have to
grapple if we are to fufil our trust as the guardians of the home and
family, and those hidden wells of the national life from which spring up
all that is best and highest in the national character. Nay, I sometimes
fear lest even our increased activity in practical work may not have the
effect of calling off our attention from those deep underlying causes
which must be dealt with if we are not to engage in the hopeless task of
trying to fill a cistern the tap of which has been left running. This
absorption in the effect and inattention to the cause is to a certain
degree bred in us by the very nature of the duties that devolve upon us
as women. John Stuart Mill has compared the life of a woman to an
"interrupted sentence." The mere fact that our lives are so interrupted
by incessant home calls, and that we are necessarily so concerned in the
details of life, is apt to make us wanting in grasp of underlying
principles. Perhaps it is the fact of my having been associated all the
early years of my life with eminent scientific men that has formed in me
a habit of mind always to regard effects in relation to causes, so that
merely to cure evil results without striking at the evil cause seems to
me, to use a Johnsonian simile, "like stopping up a hole or two of a
sieve with the hope of making it hold water."

It is, therefore, on these deeper aspects that more especially bear upon
the lives and training of our own sons that I want to write, placing
before you some facts which you must know if you are to be their