unhappy victims of these ghouls are not generally of the low and
debased sort. Most of these illegitimate mothers are of the educated
classes, many of them, shocking to say, under the age of fifteen; many
of them delicate, sensitive females, who make use of these unhallowed
means to hide their shame from the eyes of their friends and relatives.

The number of marriages (outside the Catholic Church) has largely
decreased within the past few years. The crime of infanticide is largely
increasing. A certain species of it is practised in the first families,
and the drugs and implements for committing such murders are publicly
sold everywhere. Physicians advertise publicly, offering their services
to enable people, as they say, "to enjoy the pleasures of marriage
without the burden." At least 25,000 foeticides are annually
committed. How to preserve their looks, and how to avoid having
children, seem to be the chief aim of many women nowadays. In the upper
classes of society, in some of our large cities, a lady who is the
mother of more than two children is looked upon as unfashionable.

The author of the book "Satan in Society" writes, on page 130-131, as
follows: "A medical writer of some note published, in 1861, a pamphlet,
in which he declared himself the hero of three hundred abortions." He
admits, in a work of his, that he only found abortion necessary to save
the life of the mother in four instances, thus publicly confessing that
in an immense number of cases he has performed the operation on other
grounds; and yet, in the face of all this self-accusation, several
attempts at his expulsion from his county medical society have been
defeated, and he is accounted "a brother in good standing" of several
learned bodies, and holds an enviable position in a fashionable church
and fashionable society. This rascal walks unhung; for this the "Medical
Code" is primarily responsible, and after that the "ministers of the
Gospel," the "worshippers" in the churches, the dwellers in "south
fronts."

I have said above that the love of children has always been deemed a
sign of superior intelligence--of noble manhood. Affection for its
offspring is a quality possessed alike by all animals, with scarcely an
exception; and few indeed of the millions of the animal creation seek to
destroy their own offspring after birth, or to so neglect them as to
leave them liable to destruction by other bodies or forces. It was left
for human intellige