I do not think my children are exceptionally bad or mischievous; all children are more or less so; and, of course, the more children there are in a family, the more trouble they give. Had the Roman matron, Cornelia, been the mother of seven children, instead of two, she would not have treasured them so highly, and called them her “jewels,” as the story says. Instead of being her pets, they would have been the pests of her life, as my seven children are of mine. I feel--I know I am made for a better, a higher destiny than to be the helpless victim of seven little domestic despots. The delicious bloom of my life is gone for ever. The sweet fancies, the lovely aspirations, the serene happiness that made my girlhood a perpetual joy, will nevermore be mine. My days are passed in a pandemonium from which there is no escape. I love my husband devotedly, and he deserves all my love, for a kinder, sweeter, tenderer husband never lived; but, dear as he is to me, had I known that marriage would have made my life what it is, I never would have married him. A MISERABLE MOTHER. “But surely,” said I, after I had finished reading the letter, “this must be a very extreme case. There are women who prefer large families, and who think the rearing of them no hardship.” “I scarcely think that it can be said that they do not consider it any hardship to rear such families,” replied Mr. Lister. “I remember hearing my grandmother say once that for nineteen years she did not know a single night’s unbroken rest. She had nine children. But if there be now and then a woman who is content to become a mere propagative drudge, the great majority of them are not. They have tastes and aspirations of their own, and do not care to merge them all in children. But I beg you to remember that the essential point which woman seeks to gain in her controversy with man on this subject, is the acknowledgment of her undeniable right to the complete ownership of her own person, whether the children she bears may be many or few. And on this point I assure you that woman is in dead earnest. She will have this ownership of her own person or she will allow the race to lapse from the face of the earth. Malthus certainly never foresaw any such fearful contingency. It can be compared to nothing in the entire history of the human race, unless it be the stopping of the sun at Joshua’s command.” “But if woman is granted this astonishing right,” I said, “will she not seek to escape the burden of maternity to such a degree as to seriously diminish the population?”