restored to the neighbourhood. “We do not envy the feelings of the wretched woman during the existence of the threatening outbreak, for although at some distance from the scene yet she well knew what was going forward, being made acquainted at short intervals with the position of affairs. We trust that from the experience of yesterday, Madame Restell is now convinced of the necessity of immediately closing her unlawful business; otherwise, there seems to be a most fearful certainty that _the end is not yet_.” See, what a mass of evil arises from bastard children, from child-murder, from deserted children, from diseased children, and even where the parents are most industrious and most virtuous, from a half-starved, naked, and badly housed family, from families crowded into one room, for whose health a house and garden is essential. All these matters are a tax upon love, a perpetual tax upon human pleasure, and upon health; a tax that turns beauty into shrivelled ugliness, defaces the noble attitude of mankind, and makes their condition worse than that of the cattle of the field. Then comes the consideration—what a dreadful thing it is, that health and beauty cannot be encouraged and extended, that love cannot be enjoyed without the danger of a conception, when that conception is not desired, when it is a positive injury to the parties and to society. This circumstance has been a great bar to health, strength, and beauty. What is to be done to remedy this evil? There is something to be done: a means has been discovered, a simple means, criminal in the neglect, not in the use. The destruction of conceptions have been sought by acts of violence, by doses of poison, that injure, and sometimes destroy the mother, to reach the fœtus in her womb. This is dreadful, truly dreadful. Yet custom has made it a common matter. Every village has its almost yearly cases of the kind. In this country, hundreds of infants are yearly destroyed at birth: some cases are discovered, but many pass undiscovered. We condemn and shudder at the infanticides of China and other countries: yet it is a question, if infanticide ever prevailed in any country to a greater extent than in our own. Here, then, as in every other case of disease or other evil, _it is better to prevent than to cure_, and here _prevention is most simply practicable, a means within the reach of all_.