The mother—and the race—robuster health shall share.”
“It is not the true purpose of any intellectual organism to live solely to give birth to succeeding organisms; its duty is also to live for its own happiness and well-being. Indeed, in so doing, it will be acting in one of the most certain ways to ensure that faculty and possession of happiness that it aims to secure for its progeny.”—Ben Elmy (“Studies in Materialism,” Chap. III.).
Id.... Even the placid and precisian American poet bears strong, if involuntary, testimony to the evil and wrong of the non-cultured and untempered begetting of children:—
“She wedded a man unlearned and poor,
And many children played round her door;
But care and sorrow, and child-birth pain
Left their traces on heart and brain.”
—Whittier (“Maud Müller”).
Id.... Mr. Andrew Lang also promises us “a world that is glad and clean, and not overthronged and not overdriven.”—(Introduction to “Elizabethan Songs.”)
Id.... “Justice never loses sight of self.... The language of Justice is ‘to Me and to You; or to You and to Me.’ ... We have to learn, for the action and spirit worthy of the coming time, that woman is never to sacrifice herself to a man, but, when needful, to the Manhood she hopes or desires to develop in him. In this she will also attain her own development. But after the hour when her faith in the hope of worthy results fails her (reason instructing her nobler affections by holding candidly in view all the premises, past, present, and future), she is bound by all her higher obligations to bring that career, whether it be of the daughter, sister, mother, wife, or friend, to a close. For the inferior cannot possibly be worth the sacrifice of the superior. True self-sacrifice, which necessarily involves the temporary descent of the nobler to the less noble—the higher to the lower—is made only when the lower is elevated, improved, carried forward in its career, thereby.”—Eliza W. Farnham (“Woman and Her Era,” Vol. II., p. 149).