231. I had the pleasure to know, in Hampshire, a lady who had brought up a family of ten children _by hand_, as they call it. Owing to some defect, she could not suckle her children; but she wisely and heroically resolved, that her children should hang upon no _other breast_, and that she would not participate in the crime of robbing another child of its birthright, and, as is mostly the case, of _its life_. Who has not seen these banished children, when brought and put into the arms of their mothers, screaming to get from them, and stretch out their little hands to get back into the arms of the nurse, and when safely got there, hugging the hireling as if her bosom were a place of _refuge_? Why, such a sight is, one would think, enough to strike a mother dead. And what sort of a husband and father, I want to know, must that be, who can endure the thought of his child loving another woman more than its own mother and his wife?
232. And besides all these considerations, is there no crime in robbing the child of the nurse, and in exposing it to perish? It will not do to say that the child of the nurse may be dead, and thereby leave her breast for the use of some other. Such cases must happen too seldom to be at all relied on; and, indeed, every one must see, that, generally speaking, there must be a child _cast off_ for every one that is put to a hireling breast. Now, without supposing it possible, that the hireling will, in any case, contrive to _get rid_ of her own child, every man who employs such hireling, must know, that he is exposing such child to destruction; that he is assisting to rob it of the means of life; and, of course, assisting to procure its death, as completely as a man can, in any case, assist in causing death by starvation; a consideration which will make every just man in the world recoil at the thought of employing a hireling breast. For he is not to think of pacifying his conscience by saying, that _he_ knows nothing about the hireling's child. He does know; for he must know, that she _has_ a child, and that he is a principal in robbing it of the means of life. He does not cast it off and leave it to perish himself, but he causes the thing to be done; and to all intents and purposes, he is a principal in the cruel and cowardly crime.
