“Human decrees and enactments can never alter or reverse human obligations. What is wrong without a license or commission from human government, is wrong with such a license. If an undesigned and undesired maternity be a dark and damning sin against the child, the mother, and humanity, against God, without the sanction of the Church, the State, and public opinion, it is a sin of an equally dark and damning character with such sanction. In every case where the act that leads to maternity would be a sin, a foul and monstrous crime, and the shame and infamy of one or both parents, without the sanction of human laws, it would be the same with such sanction, and in a legalized union. Those women, therefore, who for any cause, allow an undesired maternity to be imposed on them by men holding the legal relation of husbands, and permit themselves to be made the means of giving existence to children whom they do not want, in legal marriage, ought to be, and one day will be, regarded in the same light as those are who become mothers outside of wedlock. If it be wrong for a woman to become a mother, without the consent of Church and State and society, it is wrong for her to become a mother with such consent. If right with such consent, it is right without it. Whatever it is right to do with a civil, ecclesiastical or social license, it is right to do without it. “If woman’s life be made a curse by the constant endurance of suffering, consequent upon a too-frequent maternity, the religious woman often endeavors to stifle the outcries and accusations of reason and intuition by the absurd plea that she ‘must have all the children whom it is God’s will to send.’ Occasionally, one is found weak enough, and wickedly fond enough, to say, as Miss Bremer, with contemptible silliness, makes one of her amiable characters in ‘The Home’ say, ‘that though she had such a large and rapidly increasing family, and her husband’s means of providing for it were somewhat limited, yet he _never grumbled_, and was always ready to welcome each new child as it came!’ Grumble, indeed! A husband ‘grumbling’ that his wife has conceived! A father ‘grumbling’ at the birth of a child! ‘Always ready to welcome each new child as it came!’—and this said by a wife of her husband, as the strongest testimony to his manliness and justice as a husband and father, and as the highest reason why she should love and honor him! What man so base, so ignoble, so fallen, and so deserving a dungeon or the gallows, as he who imparts the germ of a new life to his wife, to gratify his passion, and then ‘grumbles’ because a child is born, and thrusts it from him? Man can give no greater proof of the utter degradation and ruin of his moral nature. Yet not to grumble at a maternity of his own imposing, and not to repel and cast off the babe for whose undesired existence he is