To remove this difficulty, children are taught to look down on their nurses, to treat them as mere servants.  When their task is completed the child is withdrawn or the nurse is dismissed.  Her visits to her foster-child are discouraged by a cold reception.  After a few years the child never sees her again.  The mother expects to take her place, and to repair by her cruelty the results of her own neglect.  But she is greatly mistaken; she is making an ungrateful foster-child, not an affectionate son; she is teaching him ingratitude, and she is preparing him to despise at a later day the mother who bore him, as he now despises his nurse.

How emphatically would I speak if it were not so hopeless to keep struggling in vain on behalf of a real reform.  More depends on this than you realise.  Would you restore all men to their primal duties, begin with the mothers; the results will surprise you.  Every evil follows in the train of this first sin; the whole moral order is disturbed, nature is quenched in every breast, the home becomes gloomy, the spectacle of a young family no longer stirs the husband’s love and the stranger’s reverence.  The mother whose children are out of sight wins scanty esteem; there is no home life, the ties of nature are not strengthened by those of habit; fathers, mothers, children, brothers, and sisters cease to exist.  They are almost strangers; how should they love one another?  Each thinks of himself first.  When the home is a gloomy solitude pleasure will be sought elsewhere.

But when mothers deign to nurse their own children, then will be a reform in morals; natural feeling will revive in every heart; there will be no lack of citizens for the state; this first step by itself will restore mutual affection.  The charms of home are the best antidote to vice.  The noisy play of children, which we thought so trying, becomes a delight; mother and father rely more on each other and grow dearer to one another; the marriage tie is strengthened.  In the cheerful home life the mother finds her sweetest duties and the father his pleasantest recreation.  Thus the cure of this one evil would work a wide-spread reformation; nature would regain her rights.  When women become good mothers, men will be good husbands and fathers.

My words are vain!  When we are sick of worldly pleasures we do not return to the pleasures of the home.  Women have ceased to be mothers, they do not and will not return to their duty.  Could they do it if they would?  The contrary custom is firmly established; each would have to overcome the opposition of her neighbours, leagued together against the example which some have never given and others do not desire to follow.