Page:The Relations Tolstoy.pdf/9

 the human conscience -manslaughter. And incontinence during pregnancy and nursing is wrong because it destroys the physical and, above all, the spiritual powers of the woman.

The deductions which ensues is that this should be avoided. And in order to avoid it, one should understand that continence, which is an indispensable condition of human dignity in the unmarried state, is still more essential in the married one.

This in the third place.

Fourthly, in this society, in which children are considered either an impediment to enjoyment or an unfortunate accident, or else a means of pleasure when only a certain predetermined number are born, these children are brought up, not to face those problems of human life which await them as reasonable and loving beings, but only with a view to the gratification they may afford their parents. Consequently the children of men are brought up like the young of animals, the chief care of the parents being, not to prepare them for activities worthy of human beings, but (and in this the parents are supported by a pseudo-science termed Medical) to overfeed them, to increase their size, and to make them clean, white, plump and handsome. (If this is not so among the lower clauses, it is only owing to their inability to carry it out; the point of view is the same.) And in these pampered children, as in all over-fed animals, an unconquerable sexual sensitiveness appears unnaturally early, causing them terrible suffering when they attain youth. Clothes, books, sight-seeing, music, dancing, dainty fare, all the accessories of life, from pictures of boxes to stories, novels, and poems, still further heighten this sensitiveness, the result being that most dreadful sexual vices and diseases are frequent conditions of the growth of young people of both sexes, often remaining in maturity.