The woman of our class was stronger than man, and is now still stronger, not through her charms, not through her skill in performing the same pharisaic similitude of work as man, but because she has not stepped outside of the law; because she has borne that true labour with danger of life, with uttermost effort; true labour, from which the man of the wealthy classes has freed himself. But within my memory has begun also the deviation from the law by woman,--that is to say, her fall; and within my memory, it has proceeded farther and farther. A woman who has lost the law, believes that her power consists in the charms of her witchery, or in her skill at a pharisaic pretence of intellectual labour. Children hinder the one and the other. Therefore, with the help of science (science is always helpful to everything wicked) within my memory it has come to pass that among the wealthy classes, scores of means of destroying progeny have appeared, and these means become a common attribute of the toilet. And behold,--women, mothers, some of them of the wealthy classes, who held their power in their hands, let it slip away, and place themselves on a level with women of the street. The evil has spread far, and spreads farther every day, and will soon grasp all the women of the wealthy classes; and then they will be on a level with the men, and together with them will lose every reasonable sense of life. There will be no return for this class then. But there is yet time. For there still remain more women than men who accomplish the law of their life, therefore there are still reasonable beings among them,--and thus some of the women of our class hold in their hands the possibility of salvation. If only women would understand their worth, their power, and would use these for the work of salvation of their husbands, brothers, and children,--the salvation of all men! Women, mothers of the wealthy classes, in your hands is the salvation of men of our world from the evils from which it suffers. Not those women who are occupied by their figures, bustles, head-dresses, and their charms for men, and who, against their will, by accident and in despair, bear children, and then give them over to wet-nurses; nor yet those who go to different lectures, and talk of psychometrical centres of differentiation, and who also try to free themselves from bearing children not to hinder their folly, which they call development,--but those women and mothers who, having the power of freeing themselves from child-bearing, hold strictly and consciously to that eternal, immutable law, knowing that the weight and labour of that submission is the aim of their life. These women and mothers of our wealthy classes are those in whose hands, more than in any others, lies the salvation of the men of our sphere in life, from the calamities which oppress them.