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completed the child is withdrawn or the nurse is dismissed.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