uch onanistic
intercourse among married people as shall prevent the possibility of
conception. For instance, if it happens that a young mother suffers much
in her first confinement, at once the suggestion is made that a second
parturition may prove fatal. From that moment regular intercourse is
dreaded. Either onanism is habitually practised, or the husband becomes
a frequent visitor to dens of infamy, where to where to save his wife's
health, he encourages a traffic that leads multitudes of wretched girls
to a premature and miserable death. Every one despises those outcasts of
society; but are not the men who patronize them just as guilty? Probably
enough, if the imprudent suggestion about dangers of a second
child-bearing had not been made by the Doctor, the young wife might have
become the happy mother of a numerous family of healthy children. For we
must trust in Divine Providence. If a husband and wife do their
conscientious duty, there is a God that provides for them and their
family more liberally than for the birds of the air and the lilies of
the field. And if He should so dispose that the worst should befall,
well, such temporal clangers and sufferings as attend child-bearing are
the lot of woman-kind, just as the dangers and hardships of the
battlefield, the mine, the factory, the forest, and the prairie are the
lot of the men.

The man who shirks his duty to family or country is a coward; women, as
a rule, are brave enough in their own line of duty, and patiently submit
to God's sentence pronounced in Paradise, "I will multiply thy sorrows
and thy conceptions, in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children" (Gen.
iii. 16), just as they have to submit to the words immediately
following: "Thou shalt be under thy husband's power, and he shall have
dominion over thee."

Certainly, the husband of a delicate woman ought to spare her strength
and restrain his passion, but not at the sacrifice of morality; and
Doctors ought to be very careful not to cause false or exaggerated
alarms, and thus make themselves to some extent responsible for untold
moral evils. They should remember that, as a rule, the raising of a
family is the principal purpose of a married life. The happiness and
virtue of the parties concerned depend chiefly on the faithful
performance of this duty. How sad is the lot of those--and they are
many--who undertook in early years of married life to prescribe a narrow
limit to the number of their children;