y painfully enough; how then should I feed a family
as well? And if I were compelled to fall back on the profession of
author, how would domestic cares and the confusion of children leave me
peace of mind enough in my garret to earn a living? Writings which
hunger dictates are hardly of any use, and such a resource is speedily
exhausted. Then I should have to resort to patronage, to intrigue, to
tricks ... in short to surrender myself to all those infamies, for which
I am penetrated with such just horror. Support myself, my children, and
their mother on the blood of wretches? No, madame, it were better for
them to be orphans than to have a scoundrel for their father.... Why
have I not married, you will ask? Madame, ask it of your unjust laws. It
was not fitting for me to contract an eternal engagement; and it will
never be proved to me that my duty binds me to it. What is certain is
that I have never done it, and that I never meant to do it. But we ought
not to have children when we cannot support them. Pardon me, madame;
nature means us to have offspring, since the earth produces sustenance
enough for all; but it is the rich, it is your class, which robs mine of
the bread of my children.... I know that foundlings are not delicately
nurtured; so much the better for them, they become more robust. They
have nothing superfluous given to them, but they have everything that is
necessary. They do not make gentlemen of them, but peasants or
artisans.... They would not know how to dance, or ride on horseback, but
they would have strong unwearied legs. I would neither make authors of
them, nor clerks; I would not practise them in handling the pen, but the
plough, the file, and the plane, instruments for leading a healthy,
laborious, innocent life.... I deprived myself of the delight of seeing
them, and I have never tasted the sweetness of a father's embrace. Alas,
as I have already told you, I see in this only a claim on your pity, and
I deliver them from misery at my own expense."[145] We may see here that
Rousseau's sophistical eloquence, if it misled others, was at least as
powerful in misleading himself, and it may be noted that this letter,
with its talk of the children of the rich taking bread out of the mouths
of the children of the poor, contains the first of those socialistic
sentences by which the writer in after times gained so famous a name. It
is at any rate clear from this that the real motive of the abandonment
of t