about in canvass frocks and rotten cottons.  Nor shall any man persuade me that that was a rude and beggarly state of things, in which (reign of Edward the Third) an act was passed regulating the wages of labour, and ordering that a woman, for weeding in the corn, should receive a penny a day, while a quart of red wine was sold for a penny, and a pair of men’s shoes for two-pence.  No man shall make me believe that agriculture was in a rude state, when an act like this was passed, or that our ancestors of that day were rude in their minds, or in their thoughts.  Indeed, there are a thousand proofs, that, whether in regard to domestic or foreign affairs, whether in regard to internal freedom and happiness, or to weight in the world, England was at her zenith about the reign of Edward the Third.  The Reformation, as it is called, gave her a complete pull down.  She revived again in the reigns of the Stuarts, as far as related to internal affairs; but the ‘Glorious Revolution’ and its debt and its taxes, have, amidst the false glare of new palaces, roads, and canals, brought her down until she is become the land of domestic misery and of foreign impotence and contempt; and, until she, amidst all her boasted improvements and refinements, tremblingly awaits her fall.

236.  However, to return from this digression, rude and unrefined as our mothers might be, plain and unvarnished as they might be in their language, accustomed as they might be to call things by their names, though they were not so very delicate as to use the word small-clothes; and to be quite unable, in speaking of horn-cattle, horses, sheep, the canine race, and poultry, to designate them by their sexual appellations; though they might not absolutely faint at hearing these appellations used by others; rude and unrefined and indelicate as they might be, they did not suffer, in the cases alluded to, the approaches of men, which approaches are unceremoniously suffered, and even sought, by their polished and refined and delicate daughters; and of unmarried men too, in many cases; and of very young men.

237.  From all antiquity this office was allotted to woman.  Moses’s life was saved by the humanity of the Egyptian midwife; and to the employment of females in this memorable case, the world is probably indebted for that which has been left it by that greatest of all law-givers, whose institutes, rude as they were, have been the foundation of all the wisest and most just laws in all the countries of Europe and America.  It was the fellow feeling of the midwife for the poor mother that saved Moses.  And none but a mother can, in such cases, feel to the full and effectual extent that which the operator ought to feel.  She has been in the same state herself; she knows more about the matter, except in cases of very