229.  Why, now, did I not love her the more for this?  Did not this tend to rivet her to my heart?  She was enduring this for me; and would not this endearing thought have been wanting, if I had seen the baby at a breast that I had hired and paid for; if I had had two women, one to bear the child and another to give it milk?  Of all the sights that this world affords, the most delightful in my eyes, even to an unconcerned spectator, is, a mother with her clean and fat baby lugging at her breast, leaving off now-and-then and smiling, and she, occasionally, half smothering it with kisses.  What must that sight be, then, to the father of the child?

230.  Besides, are we to overlook the great and wonderful effect that this has on the minds of children?  As they succeed each other, they see with their own eyes, the pain, the care, the caresses, which their mother has endured for, or bestowed, on them; and nature bids them love her accordingly.  To love her ardently becomes part of their very nature; and when the time comes that her advice to them is necessary as a guide for their conduct, this deep and early impression has all its natural weight, which must be wholly wanting if the child be banished to a hireling breast, and only brought at times into the presence of the mother, who is, in fact, no mother, or, at least, but half a one.  The children who are thus banished, love (as is natural and just) the foster-mother better than the real mother as long as they are at the breast.  When this ceases, they are taught to love their own mother most; but this teaching is of a cold and formal kind.  They may, and generally do, in a short time, care little about the foster-mother; the teaching weans all their affection from her, but it does not transfer it to the other.

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?