“Can love do any injury to its object? Must not the wife become alienated from the husband, who, instead of cherishing her health and beauty, and seeking her happiness, subjects her to the loss of all these, and instead of honoring, basely enslaves her to his own infamous passion?—who, instead of protecting from evil, exposes her to sickness, sorrow and death, not in accordance with her own free will, her own glad choice, in pursuit of an object worthy and great enough to inspire hope, courage and strength to meet the coming suffering, and the attainment of which shall amply compensate, and cause her ‘to remember no more the anguish, for joy’ that a new life is given unto her, but simply and solely that his own mean, selfish, animal nature may find present satisfaction? Deserves such a man the blessings of a home of love and harmony, the devotion of wife and little ones? Alas! no; he has planted only curses, and ‘whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.’ “Must not such a wife, too, regard the creative function in both herself and husband with loathing and abhorrence? And did not the power of refusing this unwelcome maternity reside within herself, who could blame her for reproaching even the great Creator for so endowing her with a capacity for unremunerative suffering? And what must be the atmosphere of that house (I will not dignify it by the sacred name of _home_), where the wife and mother regards her own nature as degraded,—her husband the tyrant who degrades, and her children the fruits of this degradation? Is that house a fit nursery for the germs of a noble Humanity? Do not plants there take root which cumber the earth, and, in their turn, fill it anew with those briers and thorns of human kind, which render its habitations places of cursing and bitterness? “Alas for the poor child of such a parentage! Receiving his very being by a base act of the father, nourished until birth underneath the heart of the mother, whose whole nature protests against its existence, feeding upon her bitterness, hatred, and sense of humiliation, the gall and wormwood of her soul infused into its young being, coming at last into the world destitute of the inheritance of love,—the inheritance justly his own,—where shall be the resting-place of that child’s soul? Around what can it lovingly cling? Even its own mother regards it as an unwelcome intruder; in whose loving bosom shall it be tenderly nurtured?