University of Virginia Library

I must write you a line to say how much I have appreciated
your article, The Woman who Toils. But to me
there is a most melancholy side to it, when you touch
upon what is fundamentally infinitely more important
than any other question in this country—that is, the
question of race suicide, complete or partial.

An easy, good-natured kindliness, and a desire to be
"independent,"—that is, to live one's life purely according
to one's own desires,—are in no sense substitutes for
the fundamental virtues, for the practice of the strong
racial qualities without which there can be no strong
races—the qualities of courage and resolution in both
men and women, of scorn of what is mean, base, and
selfish, of eager desire to work or fight or suffer as the
case may be, provided the end to be gained is great
enough, and the contemptuous putting aside of mere
ease, mere vapid pleasure, mere avoidance of toil and
worry. I do not know whether I most pity or despise
the foolish and selfish man or woman who does not understand
that the only things really worth having in life are
those the acquirement of which normally means cost and
effort. If a man or woman, through no fault of his or
hers, goes throughout life denied those highest of all joys
which spring only from home life, from the having and
bringing up of many healthy children, I feel for them deep
and respectful sympathy,—the sympathy one extends
to the gallant fellow killed at the beginning of a campaign,
or to the man who toils hard and is brought to ruin by the
fault of others. But the man or woman who deliberately

avoids marriage and has a heart so cold as to know no
passion and a brain so shallow and selfish as to dislike
having children, is in effect a criminal against the race
and should be an object of contemptuous abhorrence by
all healthy people.

Of course no one quality makes a good citizen, and no
one quality will save a nation. But there are certain great
qualities for the lack of which no amount of intellectual
brilliancy or of material prosperity or of easiness of life
can atone, and the lack of which shows decadence and
corruption in the nation, just as much if they are produced
by selfishness and coldness and ease-loving laziness
among comparatively poor people as if they are
produced by vicious or frivolous luxury in the rich. If
the men of the nation are not anxious to work in many
different ways, with all their might and strength, and
ready and able to fight at need, and anxious to be
fathers of families, and if the women do not recognize
that the greatest thing for any woman is to be a good
wife and mother, why, that nation has cause to be alarmed
about its future.

There is no physical trouble among us Americans.
The trouble with the situation you set forth is one of
character, and therefore we can conquer it if we only will.