he children was wholly material. He could not afford to maintain
them, and he did not wish to have his comfort disturbed by
their presence.

There is assuredly no word to be said by any one with firm reason and
unsophisticated conscience in extenuation of this crime. We have only to
remember that a great many other persons in that lax time, when the
structure of the family was undermined alike in practice and
speculation, were guilty of the same crime; that Rousseau, better than
they, did not erect his own criminality into a social theory, but was
tolerably soon overtaken by a remorse which drove him both to confess
his misdeed, and to admit that it was inexpiable; and that the atrocity
of the offence owes half the blackness with which it has always been
invested by wholesome opinion, to the fact that the offender was by and
by the author of the most powerful book by which parental duty has been
commended in its full loveliness and nobility. And at any rate, let
Rousseau be a little free from excessive reproach from all clergymen,
sentimentalists, and others, who do their worst to uphold the common and
rather bestial opinion in favour of reckless propagation, and who, if
they do not advocate the despatch of children to public institutions,
still encourage a selfish incontinence which ultimately falls in burdens
on others than the offenders, and which turns the family into a scene of
squalor and brutishness, producing a kind of parental influence that is
far more disastrous and demoralising than the absence of it in public
institutions can possibly be. If the propagation of children without
regard to their maintenance be either a virtue or a necessity, and if
afterwards the only alternatives are their maintenance in an asylum on
the one hand, and their maintenance in the degradation of a
poverty-stricken home on the other, we should not hesitate to give
people who act as Rousseau acted, all that credit for self-denial and
high moral courage which he so audaciously claimed for himself. It
really seems to be no more criminal to produce children with the
deliberate intention of abandoning them to public charity, as Rousseau
did, than it is to produce them in deliberate reliance on the besotted
maxim that he who sends mouths will send meat, or any other of the
spurious saws which make Providence do duty for self-control, and add to
the gratification of physical appetite the grotesque luxury of
religious unction.

In 1761 t