THE CRIME AGAINST THE CHILD.—Allow me now to direct your attention to this. Let the child of an undesigned and unwilling maternity arise before your mind. Ponder what life is, and how it is affected by birthright tendencies,—physical, intellectual and spiritual; see what a struggle it is, at best, and how difficult it is for those of the soundest bodies and healthiest souls, happily and successfully to meet the conflict. Call to mind the two great facts alluded to in a former letter, viz.: (1) That whatever comes to the child _before_ birth, must come to it through the blood and organism of the mother. (2) That, as this substance passes through her system, it must receive the impress of her physical and mental conditions. Whatever _temporarily_ affects her conditions, must _permanently_ affect the character and destiny of her child. You may grievously wrong your child, and subject it to physical and mental tendencies that may deeply affect its character and happiness, during its earthly existence, by subjecting it to the liability of inheriting the unhealthy and imbecile conditions in which you and the mother may be, at the time the relation was held in which it originated. Mere sensual gratification was the sole and single motive that prompted to the relation; and even in that, your wife had no part. Her heart, it may be, not only prayed against conception, as a calamity more to be dreaded than death, but this very horror of the consequences disqualified her to participate in the relation, when it was entirely mutual, and truly and rightly prompted. Her very soul shrank from it; and she submitted to it merely to gratify you, or because she had been taught to believe it a duty incumbent on all women who enter the married relation,—a duty to which she _must_ submit, or be accounted a faithless wife,—regardless of the wishes of her husband, and false to her obligations as a wife. Duty! Talk of _duty_ in such a relation! A _duty_ for a woman to submit to such a relation, when her own soul not only does not sanction, but loathes it! A _duty_ in a woman thus to lay her health, her self-respect, and her very womanhood, on the altar of legalized sensualism! A _duty_ to become a prostitute,—a mere tool of her husband’s gratification! It is a horrid mockery! As well talk to her of her _duty_ to cut her throat! No man, but a sensualist, could ever accept the surrender of a woman’s person in such relation, when he knows it is made without any call in her own nature, and merely to satisfy his passion.