the natural result motherhood becomes a burden; means are found to avoid it.  They will destroy their work to begin it over again, and they thus turn to the injury of the race the charm which was given them for its increase.  This practice, with other causes of depopulation, forbodes the coming fate of Europe.  Her arts and sciences, her philosophy and morals, will shortly reduce her to a desert.  She will be the home of wild beasts, and her inhabitants will hardly have changed for the worse.

I have sometimes watched the tricks of young wives who pretend that they wish to nurse their own children.  They take care to be dissuaded from this whim.  They contrive that husbands, doctors, and especially mothers should intervene.  If a husband should let his wife nurse her own baby it would be the ruin of him; they would make him out a murderer who wanted to be rid of her.  A prudent husband must sacrifice paternal affection to domestic peace.  Fortunately for you there are women in the country districts more continent than your wives.  You are still more fortunate if the time thus gained is not intended for another than yourself.

There can be no doubt about a wife’s duty, but, considering the contempt in which it is held, it is doubtful whether it is not just as good for the child to be suckled by a stranger.  This is a question for the doctors to settle, and in my opinion they have settled it according to the women’s wishes, [Footnote:  The league between the women and the doctors has always struck me as one of the oddest things in Paris.  The doctors’ reputation depends on the women, and by means of the doctors the women get their own way.  It is easy to see what qualifications a doctor requires in Paris if he is to become celebrated.] and for my own part I think it is better that the child should suck the breast of a healthy nurse rather than of a petted mother, if he has any further evil to fear from her who has given him birth.

Ought the question, however, to be considered only from the physiological point of view?  Does not the child need a mother’s care as much as her milk?  Other women, or even other animals, may give him the milk she denies him, but there is no substitute for a mother’s love.

The woman who nurses another’s child in place of her own is a bad mother; how can she be a good nurse?  She may become one in time; use will overcome nature, but the child may perish a hundred times before his nurse has developed a mother’s affection for him.

And this affection when developed has its drawbacks, which should make any feeling woman afraid to put her child out to nurse.  Is she prepared to divide her mother’s rights, or rather to abdicate them in favour of a stranger; to see her child loving another more than herself; to feel that the affection he retains for his own mother is a favour, while his love for his foster-mother is a duty; for is not some affection due where there has been a mother’s care?