238. But safety to life is not ALL. The preservation of life is not to be preferred to EVERY THING. Ought not a man to prefer death to the commission of treason against his country? Ought not a man to die, rather than save his life by the prostitution of his wife to a tyrant, who insists upon the one or the other? Every man and every woman will answer in the affirmative to both these questions. There are, then, cases where people ought to submit to _certain death_. Surely, then, the mere _chance_, the mere _possibility_ of it, ought not to outweigh the mighty considerations on the other side; ought not to overcome that inborn modesty, that sacred reserve as to their _persons_, which, as I said before, is the charm of charms of the female sex, and which our mothers, _rude_ as they are called by us, took, we may be satisfied, the best and most effectual means of preserving.
239. But is there, after all, any thing _real_ in this _greater security_ for the life of either mother or child? If, then, risk were so great as to call upon women to overcome this natural repugnance to suffer the approaches of a man, that risk must be _general_; it must apply to _all_ women; and, further, it must, ever since the creation of man, _always_ have so applied. Now, resorting to the employment of _men_-operators has not been in vogue in Europe more than about seventy years, and has not been _general_ in England more than about thirty or forty years. So that the _risk_ in employing midwives must, of late years, have become vastly greater than it was even when I was a boy, or the whole race must have been extinguished long ago. And, then, how puzzled we should be to account for the building of all the cathedrals, and all the churches, and the draining of all the marshes, and all the fens, more than a thousand years before the word '_accoucheur_' ever came from the lips of woman, and before the thought came into her mind? And here, even in the use of this _word_, we have a specimen of the _refined delicacy_ of the present age; here we have, varnish the matter over how we may, modesty in the _word_ and grossness in the _thought_. Farmers' wives, daughters, and maids, cannot now allude to, or hear named, without _blushing_, those affairs of the homestead, which they, within my memory, used to talk about as freely as of milking or spinning; but, have they become more _really modest_ than their mothers were? Has this _refinement_ made them more _continent_ than those _rude_ mothers? A jury at Westminster gave, about six years ago, _damages_ to a man, calling himself a gentleman, against a farmer, because the latter, for the purpose for which such animals are kept, had a _bull_ in his yard, on which the windows of the gentleman looked! The plaintiff alleged, that this was _so offensive_ to his _wife_ and _daughters_, that, if the defendant were not compelled to desist, he should be obliged to _brick up his windows, or to quit the house_! If I had been the father of these, at once, _delicate_ and _curious_ daughters, I would not have been the herald of their purity of mind; and if I had been the suitor of one of them, I would have taken care to give up the suit with all convenient speed; for how could I reasonably have hoped ever to be able to prevail on delicacy, _so exquisite_, to commit itself to a pair of bridal sheets? In spite, however, of all this '_refinement_ in the human mind,' which is everlastingly dinned in our ears; in spite of the '_small-clothes_,' and of all the other affected stuff, we have this conclusion, this indubitable _proof_, of the falling off in _real_ delicacy; namely, that common prostitutes, formerly unknown, now swarm in our towns, and are seldom wanting even in our villages; and where there was _one_ illegitimate child (including those coming before the time) only fifty years ago, there are now _twenty_.
