responsible, is Miss Bremer’s highest conception of manhood! “But a false religious education is not the only reason why woman weakly and unrighteously yields herself to the base and brutal passion of her husband; for a passion, though all pure and ennobling when its demands are just and naturally answered, becomes most base and brutalizing to men and women, when indulged at the expense of the child, and contrary to the wishes of the wife and mother. As society is now constituted, she is his dependant. The laws make her subservient to his will, while she continues a wife, and all-pervading custom has, in great measure, deprived her of the dignity which an independent ability to engage in business for herself, outside the domestic circle, would confer. “‘_Can do_ is easily carried about,’ is a pithy old Scottish proverb; and this same ‘Can do’ is a good and sturdy staff of self-support, when a woman finds that the man on whom she fondly leaned would become to her, not a tower of strength and a refuge from the storm, but the oppressor to crush both soul and body, and make of her very Womanhood an unworthy thing. Let woman respect herself. She will gain nothing by submitting to wrong and outrage. No wife ever gained or perpetuated the love and respect of a husband, deserving the name, by yielding to his passion, merely to please him. “It is the popular, but foolish and unthinking belief, that children owe great obligations to their parents for bringing them into life; but is not the contrary the fact, that parents are under the strongest possible obligations to their children to render that being good, wise, and happy, which they themselves have forced upon their child? Assuming this as self-evident, then is it clear that such existence should not be the result of blind, unthinking passion, but of careful, wise and loving design. “The act in which the child originates is performed, often, solely for the momentary gratification of one or both parents. No thought for the welfare, the physical, mental and spiritual organization and tendencies of the child that may ensue, is entertained. No careful and anxious forethought for the character and destiny of the child is exercised, but the gratification of mere animal passion is the sole object sought. The child comes into being undesigned by the father and undesired by the mother,—the offspring of reckless, selfish, sensual lust, and not of tender, self-forgetting, noble love. How grievous the wrong done by the father to the mother, and by the mother to herself, and by both to the child who is thus thrust into the world by violence! What hope can exist for such a child? The felon’s doom was written on his soul before he was born. His parents consigned him to the dungeon or the gallows ere he drew the breath of life.