“Fathers and mothers! not you who have your nursery and your nursery-maids, and who leave your children at home, to frequent the crowded rout, or to glitter in the hot ball-room; but you by the labor of whose hands your children are to live, and who, as you count their rising numbers, sigh to think how soon sickness or misfortune may lessen those wages which are now but just sufficient to afford them bread—fathers and mothers in humble life! to you my argument comes home, with the force of reality. Others may impugn—may ridicule it. By bitter experience you know and feel its truth. “Yet this is not all. Every physician knows, that there are many women so constituted that they cannot give birth to healthy—sometimes not to _living_ children. Is it desirable—is it _moral_, that such women should become pregnant? Yet this is continually the case, the warnings of physicians to the contrary notwithstanding. Others there are, who ought never to become parents; because, if they do, it is only to transmit to their offspring grievous hereditary diseases; perhaps that worst of diseases, insanity. Yet they will not lead a life of celibacy. They marry. They become parents, and the world suffers by it. That a human being should give birth to a child, knowing that he transmits to it hereditary disease, is in my opinion an immorality. But it is a folly to expect that we can ever induce all such persons to live the lives of Shakers. Nor is it necessary; all that duty requires of them is, to refrain from becoming parents. Who can estimate the beneficial effect which rational moral restraint may thus have, on the health, beauty, and physical improvement of our race, throughout future generations? “But, apart from these latter considerations, is it not most plainly, clearly, incontrovertibly _desirable_, that parents _should have the power_[29] to limit their offspring, whether they choose to exercise it or not? Who _can_ lose by their having this power? and how many _may_ gain! may gain competency for themselves, and the opportunity carefully to educate and provide for their children! How many may escape the jarrings, the quarrels, the disorder, the anxiety, which an overgrown family too often causes in the domestic circle? “It sometimes happens, that individual instances come home to the feelings with greater force than any general reasoning. I shall, in this place, adduce one which came immediately under my cognizance.