Neither should you ever impose maternity on your wife at the expense of her _social_ nature. Never go abroad to enjoy and develop your own social nature, and leave her at home alone in the nursery, preparing to give birth and a worthy reception to your child, or to spend her weary hours in solitude, in anxious watchings over your children, and in longings for your presence and your sympathy. Stay with her, and share with her all the joys and all the sorrows, all the sweet rest and all the weary labors, of a maternity imposed by you, and of developing into noble men or women the offspring of your mutual love. But how crushed, intellectually and socially, must that wife become, on whom an ignorant, a thoughtless, or a brutal husband, is ever imposing a maternity from which her soul recoils! Her intellect becomes dwarfed and her social nature dead. How can it be otherwise, especially when driven to the deed of ante-natal murder, to escape the horror of giving birth to children accursed by the mother that bore them? Hope becomes extinct, and the light of her soul goes out in utter darkness! The following letter must speak for itself. It is nearly a _verbatim_ extract from a letter, the original of which is now before me. No man, especially no husband, can read it, and not feel quickened in all that is truly manly, noble and God-like. Of this woman, as to her style and her sentiments, every true man will feel that to be true which the people said of the teachings of Jesus—“HE SPEAKS AS ONE HAVING AUTHORITY.” May her words of power find a response in the heart of every husband and wife, and of every man and woman! “The subject of an undesigned and undesired maternity,—how it affects the mother towards the child, towards the function of Maternity itself,—these are matters, on which, as a wife and a mother, and a friend of Human Progress, my mind has been deeply exercised since they were first presented to me. The delicate and hallowed beauty with which you invest maternity, and the relation that leads to it, renders it easy for me to impart to you my views on these subjects, while I feel instinctively repelled from any approach to them with most other persons, both men and women. “The thoughts I have do not flow from my own experience. I have never given birth to a child not earnestly desired. Yet, being a woman and a mother, it seems to me no difficult matter to judge correctly as to what must necessarily be the emotions and effects produced by such a maternity.