e but praise. 'Little improvement' he adds, 'can be
expected in morality until the producing too large families is regarded
with the same feeling as drunkenness, or any other physical excess.' A
well-known medical writer, Dr. Drysdale, in commenting on these words,
adds: 'In this error, if error it be, I also humbly share.'

'When dangerous prejudices,' says Sismondi, the learned historian of
southern Europe, 'have not become accredited, when our true duties
towards those to whom we give life are not obscured in the name of a
sacred authority, no married man will have more children than he can
bring up properly.'

Such is the language of physicians and statesmen; but a stronger appeal
has been made for the sake of morality itself. The detestable crime of
_abortion_ is appallingly rife in our day; it is abroad in our land to
an extent which would have shocked the dissolute women of pagan Rome.
Testimony from all quarters, especially from New England, has
accumulated within the past few years to sap our faith in the morality
and religion of American women. This wholesale, fashionable murder, how
are we to stop it? Hundreds of vile men and women in our large cities
subsist by this slaughter of the innocents, and flaunt their ill-gotten
gains--the price of blood--in our public thoroughfares. Their
advertisements are seen in the newspapers; their soul and body
destroying means are hawked in every town. With such temptation strewn
in her path, what will the woman threatened with an excessive family
do? Will she not yield to evil, and sear her conscience with the
repetition of her wickedness? Alas! daily experience in the heart of a
great city discloses to us only too frequently the fatal ease of such a
course.

In view of the injuries of excessive child-bearing on the one hand, and
of this prevalent crime on the other, a man of genius and sympathy, Dr.
Raciborski of Paris, took the position that the avoidance of offspring
to a certain extent is not only legitimate, but should be recommended as
a measure of public good. 'We know how bitterly we shall be attacked,'
he says, 'for promulgating this doctrine; but if our ideas only render
to society the services we expect of them, we shall have effaced from
the list of crimes the one most atrocious without exception, that of
child-murder, before or after birth, and we shall have poured a little
happiness into the bosoms of despairing families, where poverty is
allied to the know