The number of marriages (outside the Catholic Church) has largely decreased within the past few years. The crime of infanticide is largely increasing. A certain species of it is practised in the first families, and the drugs and implements for committing such murders are publicly sold everywhere. Physicians advertise publicly, offering their services to enable people, as they say, "to enjoy the pleasures of marriage without the burden." At least 25,000 foeticides are annually committed. How to preserve their looks, and how to avoid having children, seem to be the chief aim of many women nowadays. In the upper classes of society, in some of our large cities, a lady who is the mother of more than two children is looked upon as unfashionable. The author of the book "Satan in Society" writes, on page 130-131, as follows: "A medical writer of some note published, in 1861, a pamphlet, in which he declared himself the hero of three hundred abortions." He admits, in a work of his, that he only found abortion necessary to save the life of the mother in four instances, thus publicly confessing that in an immense number of cases he has performed the operation on other grounds; and yet, in the face of all this self-accusation, several attempts at his expulsion from his county medical society have been defeated, and he is accounted "a brother in good standing" of several learned bodies, and holds an enviable position in a fashionable church and fashionable society. This rascal walks unhung; for this the "Medical Code" is primarily responsible, and after that the "ministers of the Gospel," the "worshippers" in the churches, the dwellers in "south fronts." I have said above that the love of children has always been deemed a sign of superior intelligence--of noble manhood. Affection for its offspring is a quality possessed alike by all animals, with scarcely an exception; and few indeed of the millions of the animal creation seek to destroy their own offspring after birth, or to so neglect them as to leave them liable to destruction by other bodies or forces. It was left for human intelligences to encompass the death of their children, both before birth and after, and it was left to the anti-Christian civilization of this nineteenth century also to discover and adopt the most revolting and barbarous means to accomplish this end. The crime of foeticide, or infanticide, is not of recent growth. Like every other crime, it has had a venerable existence, but its beastly development among us has been mainly the work of a few years. Thirteen years ago its prevalence attracted the attention of medical jurists in all parts of our country, and essays, tracts, and bound volumes were issued against it. But the crime grew apace, and its deadly and dastardly fruits appear before us to-day, sickening to the moral conscience and religious sentiments of the nation.