there is any order of knowledge or any kind of power which
were better unknown or unavailable. For many years past we have been
told that the power to control parenthood is wicked, flying in the face
of providence, interfering with the order of Nature--as if every act
worthy of the human name were not an interference with the order of
Nature, as Nature is conceived by fools; and even to-day the churches,
violently differing from each other in the region of incomprehensibles,
are at least agreed in anathematizing the knowledge and the power to
control parenthood. The reply to them is the demonstration, here made,
of the fact that this knowledge may be used for no less splendid a
purpose than to make possible the happiness and mutual ennoblement of
individual lives in cases where otherwise such a consummation would have
been impossible without betrayal of the life of this world to come.

There is another class of cases to which convenient reference may here
be made. The solution to be found in childless marriage, for many cases,
does not apply to those in which there is present disease due to living
organisms, microbes or protozoa which, by the mere act of drinking from
an infected cup, by kissing and so forth, may be passed from the sick to
the sound. So far as these modes of infection are concerned, such a
supposed case as that of the nurse and the consumptive patient who fall
in love with each other comes into this category. But infection of that
kind is preventable. In the case, however, of the terrible diseases to
which reference has been made in a previous chapter, we must clearly
understand that it is not only the future which is in danger, and that
therefore the solution of childless marriage does not apply. Here the
danger is irremovable from the physical _essentia_ of the marriage
itself, and in such a case, no matter how high the personal qualities of
the man who may, for instance, have been infected by accident in the
course of his duty as a doctor, even childless marriage other than the
_mariage blanc_ must be, at any rate, postponed until the disease has
been cured.

It is to be hoped that the reader will not regard these last two points,
which have had to be dealt with at some length, as irrelevant. They are
not strictly part of the general proposition that a girl should marry a
man for his personal qualities, but they are surely necessary as
practical comments upon that proposition as it will work out in