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I am quite sure that many excellent people will find this plea immoral, that they will say it is condoning irregular sex union, that it is removing the burden from those who have transgressed. I deny these suggestions even before they are made. To my mind there is more immorality, more glaring offence to the Creator in one battlefield full of dead and mangled humanity, than in all the illegitimate children who will have come crying into our tear-stricken world before the war draws to its end. Those who rule over Europe and, being unable to settle their differences, sent millions of men, who have no quarrel, to deface the earth and slaughter one another, are morally responsible for every change in the normal life of mankind. Those who replenish the earth are better than those who destroy it.

War is a monstrous immorality that seeks to destroy the world; the illicit unions, to which I refer in the interest of those who pay the penalty—the mother and the child—are a minor immorality from which, with a little care, a little loving-kindness, and a little fore-knowledge, much good, much deep morality may spring.