Read the following. The extract is from a letter written by one who has proudly and nobly filled the stations of a wife and a mother, and whose children and grandchildren surround her and crown her life with tenderest love and respect. She has seen many of the companions of her girlhood victimized, and literally offered up on the altar of sensualism, in legal marriage. Their husbands demanded passional gratification as their _right_, irrespective of consequences to wife or children, and they submitted as a _duty_. Their career was short, in many cases, and in others, they live but wrecks of their former selves. A relation that should have ennobled and saved them, has crushed them to death: “It has often been a matter of wonder to me that men should, so heedlessly, and so injuriously to themselves, their wives, and children, and their homes, demand at once, as soon as they get legal possession of their wives, the gratification of a passion, which, when indulged merely for the sake of the gratification of the moment, must end in the destruction of all that is beautiful, noble, and divine, in man or woman. I have often felt that I would give the world for a friendship with man that should show no impurity in its bearing, and for a conjugal relation that would, at all times, heartily and practically recognize the right of the wife to decide for herself when, how often, and under what auspices, she should be a mother, or enter into the relation that leads to maternity. “It is often said in my hearing, by women, that a woman who is not willing to submit her person to the passion of her husband, whenever he shall demand, is not fit to be a wife; and if she becomes so, and her husband forsakes her for other women, and neglects his children, he is to be pitied, and the wife condemned and held responsible for all the results. The law gives the husband cause for divorce if the wife persists in withholding her person from his embrace, which, when thus thrust upon her against her wishes, becomes loathsome and damnable. The community of women generally endorse this state of things, and are educated to believe that God gave man such fierce passions that he cannot control them; that they must be gratified whenever excited, though at the expense of woman’s health and happiness and the happiness of her children.