Life & Wisdom Quote by Olive Schreiner

Schreiner doesn’t offer a sentimental ode to motherhood; she stages a brutal cost-benefit argument against a culture that treats violence as civic virtue. The line’s power comes from its cold arithmetic: “one” carefully raised life outweighs “ten thousand” deaths. That lopsided comparison is the point. It shames the martial imagination by forcing it onto the same ledger as care work, where effort is slow, intimate, and morally legible. “Rear it well” is the quiet provocation: it insists that producing a human being isn’t the achievement; the achievement is the sustained, everyday labor of making a person capable of dignity. In a society happy to hand medals to killers and platitudes to caregivers, Schreiner flips the hierarchy.

The intent is unmistakably anti-militarist, but the subtext is feminist and political. Schreiner, writing from the pressures of late-Victorian empire and the South African conflicts that culminated in the Boer War, knew how easily grand national projects justify mass death while dismissing the domestic sphere as private and apolitical. By calling the human being “it,” she strips away romance and ownership; the child isn’t a possession, but a moral project. The ellipsis in the middle does its own work, a pause that lets the reader feel the obscene jump from nurture to slaughter.

What makes it endure is that it doesn’t argue war is tragic; it argues war is mediocre, a crude shortcut compared to the radical difficulty of raising a “noble” person. In Schreiner’s equation, creation isn’t softer than destruction. It’s harder, and therefore finer.