This is not the page whereon to record a frank and full opinion upon such a subject, nor is mine the will or ability to treat of the mysteries of iniquity, the violence done to conscience, humanity, and natural affection, that have come to be talked of in the so-called higher circles as familiar things, convenient and expedient measures for leaving fashionable mothers--(does not the holy word look like a bitter sarcasm, written in this connection?)--for leaving frivolous, heartless mothers, I say, at liberty to follow the devices of their own foolish brains, and delivering sordid fathers from what I have heard professing Christians style--“the curse of a large family.” I know that such abominations do exist, and so does the fair reader, who is ready to ostracize me for daring to hint thus publicly at what she privately approves and advocates. I can see that our pleasure-loving neighbors over the water are in a fair way to be rivaled, if not eclipsed, in certain respects, by their American cousins. Further than this I will not go. I only refer to this, to me revolting subject, to substantiate a conclusion at which I have arrived in the course of my serious and often sadly troubled lucubrations with regard to this matter. It is my conviction that the real root of the evil lies back of this, its most reprehensible offshoot. I have no means of settling the date at which the opinion or prejudice was implanted on this continent, but certain it is, that a vast proportion--I fear, a large majority--of American mothers, would secretly, if not openly, controvert my first proposition. There is among us, if not a woeful deficiency of genuine maternal instinct, a style--a fashion, if you choose to call it, and a very vile fashion it is--of deprecating as a grievous affliction the repeated visits of what a higher authority than “the noted Dr. ----, from Paris,” or the autocrat of neighborhood gossips, has declared to be among Heaven’s best gifts to human kind. “Poor Mrs. A., with her eight children, like a flight of stairs--just two years between them”--is, by her friends’ very pity, made to feel that she is, in some sense, the inferior of Mrs. B., who “manages _so_ beautifully!” She has but three, and they are seven years apart.