“When my friend, Dr. E. H. C., had opened my eyes to the actual fact, I felt so disgusted that I could have prayed to die. Since I could not do that, I did not hesitate to speak with unction to the large class of women who privately appealed to me, and to whose plain language I had not before known how to return any adequate answer. “Will you believe me, when I say that I usually find it easier to induce the victim of seduction to take the consequences of her weakness than to persuade the fashionable woman to refrain from crime? The nether millstone is not so hard as the heart of a worldly woman. You will hardly concede to me the right to speak to you upon the matter in a physiological way, but will you overlook the seeming want of modesty which permits me to say that there is one argument which has weight with this class of women that has not been appealed to? From the moment that I understood the frequency of the attempts made to prevent impregnation and induce abortion, I felt that I had a key to the loss of beauty, of expression, and the sweet maternal charm, which every one who thinks must miss in this generation of women. “You speak feelingly of the large families which used to make the homestead charming and attractive, but you say nothing of that element of motherliness, which I have missed for years, and especially of that genial, loving, thoughtful grandmother who used to be the beneficent fairy of childhood. “I despised myself for it, but I did look in women’s faces to see what marks their lives had left, and I tell you that it is a simple fact, that women who habitually prevent impregnation grow cold, debased, unlovely in their expression, and that those who resort to abortion become sharp, irritable, and ungenial, everything, in short, that we mean by unmotherly. “Now we may predict disease and death to these fashionable women forever in vain. They will not believe; they are sure they shall escape whoever else is lost; but if you tell them that they are destroying all sweetness, grace, and charm, and that this innermost secret of their lives is written plain on lip and brow for him who runs to read, the mirror itself will bear witness to them. And if to their startled consciousness you go on to urge the loveliness which wraps that woman round who gives herself gracefully to this, the highest function of her life, not merely loving him who gives her children to her, but loving them so much that she would rather live on the simplest food, and wear the plainest dress, draped and crowned with this maternal honor, than have all luxury and all power, about an unlovely and lonely way,—I think one often may, through woman’s very weakness, appeal to and touch the most sacred impulses of her nature.