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?

232. And besides all these considerations, is there no crime in robbing
the child of the nurse, and in exposing it to perish? It will not do to
say that the child of the nurse may be dead, and thereby leave her
breast for the use of some other. Such cases must happen too seldom to
be at all relied on; and, indeed, every one must see, that, generally
speaking, there must be a child _cast off_ for every one that is put to
a hireling breast. Now, without supposing it possible, that the hireling
will, in any case, contrive to _get rid_ of her own child, every man who
employs such hireling, must know, that he is exposing such child to
destruction; that he is assisting to rob it of the means of life; and,
of course, assisting to procure its death, as completely as a man can,
in any case, assist in causing death by starvation; a consideration
which will make every just man in the world recoil at the thought of
employing a hireling breast. For he is not to think of pacifying his
conscience by saying, that _he_ knows nothing about the hireli