For the woman, enfeebled perhaps by too excessive child-bearing, for which her husband is generally wholly responsible, for few of our wives do not become, sooner or later, virtually apathetic; for the woman, timid, easily alarmed, prone to mental depression or other disturbance, and dreading the yet safe and preferable labor that awaits her, and withal under that strange and mastering thraldom of fashion, there is a certain measure of excuse. For her husband, none. This is a matter concerning which the public mind is now undergoing a radical change. Slow to set in motion, but every day gaining more rapidly in force, the world’s revival proceeds. In “Why Not?” or “Why should women not commit this crime?” I have sounded almost a trump to awake the dead. Would, indeed, that it might arouse a better life in every man who reads these words: “Of the mother, by consent or by her own hand, imbrued with her infant’s blood; of the more guilty father, who counsels or allows the crime; of the wretches who, by their wholesale murders, far out-Herod Burke and Hare; of the public sentiment which palliates, pardons, and would even praise this, so common, violation of all law, human and divine, of all instinct, all reason, all pity, all mercy, all love, we leave those to speak who can.”[33] What, then, I repeat, do husbands usually claim? The right to their wives’ persons, to use or abuse at their pleasure; the right to their wives’ happiness, and to endanger or destroy it, as they may choose; the right to their wives’ lives and those of their offspring, and to destroy these also, the latter directly, the former thus indirectly, and at times also, by their physical violence or their persistent though petty cruelties, very directly too. Formerly men had control, exclusive and entire, of any possessions their wives might bring them. Now, and with us at least, the law has very materially curtailed the husband’s power in this respect, save it be granted him by the wife’s consent. Will the time come, think ye, when husbands can no longer, as they now frequently do, commit the crime of rape upon their unwilling wives, and persuade them or compel them to allow a still more dreadful violence to be wreaked upon the children nestling within them—children fully alive from the very moment of conception, that have already been fully detached from all organic connection with their parent, and only re-attached to her for the purposes of nutriment and growth, and to destroy whom “is a crime of the same nature, both against our Maker and society, as to destroy an infant, a child, or a man”?[34]