rare occurrence, than any man, however great his learning and experience, can ever know.  She knows all the previous symptoms; she can judge more correctly than man can judge in such a case; she can put questions to the party, which a man cannot put; the communication between the two is wholly without reserve; the person of the one is given up to the other, as completely as her own is under her command.  This never can be the case with a man-operator; for, after all that can be said or done, the native feeling of women, in whatever rank of life, will, in these cases, restrain them from saying and doing, before a man, even before a husband, many things which they ought to say and do.  So that, perhaps, even with regard to the bare question of comparative safety to life, the midwife is the preferable person.

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