I will add no comment, because I feel quite unable to write calmly. I can only record my belief that under a more moral public opinion and saner social organisation such crimes of mothers against their children would be impossible. Infanticide is committed always, I believe, under the biting pressure of want and despair.
The last case is in sharp contrast with all the others, and shows responsible motherhood outside of marriage. The woman here is strong and passionate and deeply maternal, but, unable to marry the man she loves, because he is married already, but to a woman who has no desire to be a mother, she chooses, therefore, to bear his child. I know several similar unions. Some of these have been temporary, some have lasted, but in each case the woman has had strength of character and a social position which have made it practicable for her thus to assert her right to motherhood. Such cases we may leave alone. I do not think any one of us should condemn such action. The immense pity is that women of this strong maternal type should by any cause be kept from marriage. They are the fittest wives and mothers.
The relation between marriage and illegitimacy is a very close one; any cause that hinders early marriage must tend to encourage the increase of illegal unions.[93] The question is, however, a very difficult one. And I am not fully convinced of the wisdom of permanent marriage being undertaken at so young an age that chance births would be prevented; at any rate, the danger would be great until our young women and young men are more sanely educated in sex. The young have very little understanding of their own need, and no experience of life; and for this reason a way might be opened up that, after marriage, would lead to even more harmful looseness of conduct. Already numerous illegitimate births are the result of unhappy marriages. This happens, perhaps, most frequently among the working classes, though I am not sure, and it may be only that among them the facts of such births are more openly known. The fear of another child to the too-hard-worked mother is often very great, and this (when the means to prevent conception are not known) causes her to refuse to have intercourse with her husband, which all too frequently sends him to another woman.