And further: not merely are researches, such as this essay is founded upon, publications for the general weal, such as it claims to be, perfectly legitimate and advisable in themselves; they have been sanctioned by precedents that have already been established. I do not refer to the attempts of unprincipled empirics to terrify the masses by overdrawn pictures of disease, nor of holy and well-meaning men to turn them to better ways by fervent descriptions of the wrath to come. We shall take neither the fear of things present nor future as our standard in this discussion, but appeal solely to each man’s reason—and such appeals have been made before. They have been made in France by Ricord, by Lallemand, and others of the great medical philosophers of the day; by Parent-Duchatelet and by Diday. In England, there are men like Acton, who dare to sound the trumpet of alarm, bringing forward their facts from private practice, from the hospital, and from the dead-house, and drawing from these indisputable conclusions. In our own country there are men like those brave souls, now one of them at least translated to a better country, Blatchford,[6] and Hodge, and Pope, and Barton, and Lopez, and Brisbane, physicians of the very highest rank in their profession, who were not ashamed, in the question of the frequency and the ill results of criminal abortion, to take stand beside me upon the platform of our personal knowledge, and knowing they dared maintain. I will cite but one instance more. It is that of a good man now gone to his rest, and a very rock he was to the swelling tide of moral as well as physical evil—the late Professor John Ware, of Massachusetts. His little work on a portion only of the topic we are now considering,[7] has stayed many a headlong step and saved many a soul alive. The book to which I refer has, however, probably obtained but a limited circulation compared with that at which I now aim, and its author, so good himself, used only the gentle, persuasive eloquence of a tongue attuned by Nature to peaceful themes. For myself, accustomed as I have been in the practice of my profession in the especial department most bearing upon this subject, to probe humanity to its lowest depths, I shall not hesitate to speak plainly the truth as it is, to pile argument upon argument, to resort to invective if need be, ay, and to apply the lash, till every man who reads me stammers, conscience-stricken or indignant, “Is it I?” For, one of themselves, both by birth and by nature, I know my ground, and my answer shall be, “Thou hast said.”