Emile | Page 8

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?
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 When their task is completed the child is withdrawn or the nurse is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.