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