Nothing is more distinctly pointed out by the constitution of her body, and therefore it is impossible that there can be any immorality in the exercise of the function. To put my idea in as few and as bold words as I can: Motherhood is a right and has no proper relation to marriage. Marriage is a purely artificial relation, and not only is it not justified by its results, but distinctly it is discredited by them. By it a man becomes a vile hypocrite since he loudly avows a moral standard and a course of conduct which in private by his acts he denies and puts to scorn; by it a woman becomes a slave, giving up her rights in her own body; submitting to ravishment, and becoming the accidental mother to unwished, unwelcome children; by it children are robbed of their plain right to the best equipment that can be given them; and which cannot be given them under the prevailing system. It is only when a woman is free to choose the father of her child that the child can hope for even a partial payment of the debt that was due it from its parents from the moment they took the responsibility of calling it from the nowhere into the here. This doctrine of the responsibility of the parent to the child is comparatively new and goes neither with marriage nor with the home. The old and current notion is that the child is a chattel. Abraham never offers an apology for making little Isaac carry wood and then mount the sacrificial pile. Indeed we are asked to marvel at the heroism of the father. Then we are told that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. As if the child were the property of the parent. And yet there must always have been naughty children asking pointed questions, for it was long ago found necessary to try to scare them by a divine fulmination. Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long! It seems that even so long ago parents were afraid they could not win honor from their children. Abraham's place was on the pile, just as it is the place of the modern parent who looks upon his child as his chattel; disposing of him as he will; arbitrarily making rules for his conduct which he would not dream of observing for himself; stifling his natural demands for knowledge; converting what is pure and most beautiful in the world into a mire of filth and ignorance; wilfully robbing him of his birthright of individuality by forcing him to conform to methods of thought and conduct which his own experience tells him no man can or does conform to from the moment he wins his freedom or learns the hideous lesson of that hypocrisy which he is sure in the end to discover that his father practices. What right has any father to make a sacrifice of his child? What is his title to the love or gratitude or self-abnegation of his child? Is it that the child is the unconsidered consequence of the legal rape of some poor woman who has been unfitted for the office forced upon her, by a life mentally dwarfed, morally