producing, as far as possible, the mentem sanam in corpore sano, and the
wonderful and blessed effects of such obedience to those laws of nature,
which are nothing but the good will of God expressed in facts--their
wonderful and blessed tendency, I say, to eliminate the germs of
hereditary disease, and to actually regenerate the human system--all this
is known; known as fully and clearly as any human knowledge need be
known; it is written in dozens of popular books and pamphlets. And why
should this divine voice, which cries to man, tending to sink into
effeminate barbarism through his own hasty and partial civilisation,--"It
is not too late. For your bodies, as for your spirits, there is an
upward, as well as a downward path. You, or if not you, at least the
children whom you have brought into the world, for whom you toil, for
whom you hoard, for whom you pray, for whom you would give your
lives,--they still may be healthy, strong, it may be beautiful, and have
all the intellectual and social, as well as the physical advantages,
which health, strength, and beauty give."--Ah, why is this divine voice
now, as of old, Wisdom crying in the streets, and no man regarding her? I
appeal to women, who are initiated, as we men can never be, into the
stern mysteries of pain, and sorrow, and self-sacrifice;--they who bring
forth children, weep over children, slave for children, and, if they have
none of their own, then slave, with the holy instinct of the sexless bee,
for the children of others--Let them say, shall this thing be?

Let my readers pardon me if I seem to write too earnestly. That I speak
neither more nor less than the truth, every medical man knows full well.
Not only as a very humble student of physiology, but as a parish priest
of thirty years' standing, I have seen so much unnecessary misery; and I
have in other cases seen similar misery so simply avoided; that the sense
of the vastness of the evil is intensified by my sense of the easiness of
the cure.