She pleads for what? For undue power in public life, for undue control in domestic affairs, for privileges not justly her own? The true wife desires none of these. Suffering through the centuries, and the varying phases of social civilization, she has been consecutively man’s slave, his idol for the moment, his toy. If recognized at all as in equality of rights, it has been in the right to suffer, and lest by nature she should not possess enough of this, woes unnecessary, unmentionable, innumerable, have been heaped upon her. Every one knows this, whether man or woman, and if woman’s voice has till now been nearly silent, she will none the less value these words of grateful appreciation, of sympathy, and of appeal to my fellows. We owe kindness to her for her kindness to us; we owe it, that we may still possess her to comfort and to cheer us; we owe it, for the sake of our children, that they may be healthy and well cared for, that indeed they may be born. The terrible fashion now so prevalent, of slaughtering the innocents while still in nature’s lap, is, in great measure, attributable to our own apathy, our own neglect, our own teachings, our own cruelty, and it behooves every one of us to make such amends as he best can. By his own life and his own example every man can show his detestation of that depravity of spirit which would turn a woman’s purity into an offence, and would nail to the block of sensuality and licentiousness the wings of angels,—so much chaster are women than ourselves. Woe unto those of us by whom such offences come. As very pertinent to this especial point, I shall here present portions of a private letter, written to me by a lady of great intellectual and moral worth, well known indeed throughout the country.[41] Her remarks are of a kind to rivet attention, plain spoken and yet delicate as they are. “I have just laid down,” she says, “your ‘Book for Every Woman,’ and I want to thank you with all my heart for having written it. I was very slow to be convinced that any woman of decent character would consciously perpetrate an abortion; still slower to see how any woman calling herself pure minded could so degrade the sanctities of marriage as to make steady and persistent attempts to prevent impregnation,—and yet I had for many years felt sure that a great many so-called ‘female diseases’ were incited and developed by the luxurious and indolent habits of our women, which permit them, when neither cultivated nor philanthropic, to become conscious of every phase of gestative action or sexual excitement. To live straight on is the only wholesome way to live, and I could see that women were not doing this, but watching themselves in a morbid fashion sure to make mischief.