nd crime. Every generous sentiment should prompt
us to go to the relief of the large number of women who suffer in
secret from tyranny and brutality, while from poverty, timidity,
helplessness, and a dread of publicity or censure, they endure their
wrongs in silence, and continue to bear children cursed from their
conception with intemperance and brutality. And when they seek to
escape, a barbarian law comes in to give the brutal husband the
ownership of their offspring; and thus they are bound fast as galley
slaves in their unhappy position.

The Legislature of Massachusetts had the opportunity of redressing
this wrong at their present session; but, like other masculine
legislatures in the past, they were deaf to the voice of mercy, and
the press quietly reports (March 18) that "Inexpedient was reported
by the House judiciary committee on equalizing the respective rights
of husband and wife in relation to their minor children, and on
equalizing their interest in each other's property."

The ladies who are so active in behalf of woman suffrage might have
taken more interest in this vital question, which was so easily
disposed of. A great wrong remains unredressed.

The barbarous policy of the church of Rome, which has been finally
abolished even in Catholic France, where divorce is now permitted, our
clerical bigots would revive in this country, as if it were the
business of the state to encourage or compel the propagation of the
worthless and criminal classes!

It is not the interest of the state to encourage human multiplication
at all, for it is already too powerful and progressive. It is the
public interest to check all propagation but that of good citizens,
and to protect all women from enforced maternity, whether enforced
under legal powers or by the arts of seduction and libertinism.

Prostitution, in the light of political economy, is far less of an
evil than the enforced maternity of wretched and discordant families,
which becomes the fountain of an endless flow of crime, while
prostitution shows its evils only in the parties immediately
concerned, and effectually purifies society in time by arresting the
propagation of its most worthless members. In the same manner it may
be said that some epidemics are an advantage to society, by cutting
off the feeble and worthless constitutions so as to leave a better
race. Any one who recollects the history of the Jukes family, and the
number of criminals infesting s