to the
world in accordance with the self-same law of reproduction. Nature may
not be always polite, but she is always truthful.

As long as there is any question of the "legitimacy" of any birth,
Humanity as a whole cannot be otherwise than inferior, because
Humanity cannot rise higher than the ideal of the average. Moreover we
are so interdependent that the whole must be affected by the
conditions of a part.

Birth is right, or it is wrong. It cannot be right under some
circumstances and wrong under others. The primal laws do not take into
account our ideas of respectability.

The question then arises: "Are we to consider it moral and legitimate
for women to have children before they have been married?"

The obvious answer to this question is, that the mother must be
permitted to decide this for herself, since no one has a right to do
it for her. Our right of interference in so intimate a matter must
begin only at the point where her conduct injures us. If an unmarried
woman chooses to give birth to a child, neither you nor I, nor Society
is injured, not even if the child becomes a charge of the state,
because the cost of maintaining a child is far less than that of
maintaining insane asylums and penitentiaries--both of which result
from our mistaken attitude toward the sex-relation.

If we are permitted to answer the question of morality and legitimacy
by generalities, we will say that any child that comes into the world
_desired by the mother_ is born in accordance with the highest
possible concept of the moral law. Whenever Society, Church and
Governments shall unite to wipe out the stain upon mother and child
because of failure to comply with our marriage laws, a better race of
men and women will people the earth, because the race-thought will be
one of welcome with all that word implies; whereas at the present
time, under our undeveloped ideas of morality, doubt, suspicion, and
condemnation prevail, with all that these words imply.

When all mothers are honored all women will be willing to be mothers.

As long as dishonor attaches to any instance of motherhood, it is
inevitable that motherhood will be avoided, even to the point of
child-murder. Not that this practice is confined to the women who
would be dishonored by becoming mothers. It obtains rather more
perhaps among those women whose wealth and ease would seem to make
motherhood desirable. Judging from surface conditions only, one might
not see the