Doubtless there are few things more important to a community than the
health of its women. The Sandwich Island proverb says:--

"If strong is the frame of the mother,
The son will give laws to the people."

And, in nations where all men give laws, all men need mothers of strong
frames.

Moreover, there is no harm in admitting that all the rules of our structure
are imperative; that soul and body, whether of man or woman, are made in
harmony, so that each part of our nature must accept the limitations of the
other. A man's soul may yearn to the stars; but so long as the body cannot
jump so high, he must accept the body's veto. It is the same with any veto
interposed in advance by the physical structure of woman. Nobody objects to
this general principle. It is only when clerical gentlemen or physiological
gentlemen undertake to go a step farther, and put in that veto on their own
responsibility, that it is necessary to say, "Hands off, gentlemen!
Precisely because women are women, they, not you, are to settle
that question."

One or two points are clear. Every specialist is liable to overrate his own
specialty; and the man who thinks of woman only as a wife and mother is apt
to forget, that, before she was either of these, she was a human being.
"Women, as such," says an able writer, "are constituted for purposes of
maternity and the continuation of mankind." Undoubtedly, and so were men,
as such, constituted for paternity. But very much depends on what relative
importance we assign to the phrase, "as such." Even an essay so careful, so
moderate, and so free from coarseness, as that here quoted, suggests, after