t 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
over how we may, modesty in the _word_ and grossness in the _thought_.
Farmers' wives, daughters, and maids, cannot now allude to, or hear
named, without _blushing_, those affairs of the homestead, which they,
within my memory, used to talk about as freely as of milking or
spinning; but, have they become more _really modest_ than their mothers
were? Has this _refinement_ made them more _continent_ than those _rude_
mothers? A jury at Westminster gave, about six years ago, _damages_ to a
man, calling himself a gentleman, against a farmer, because the latter,
for the purpose for which such animals are kept, had a _bull_ in his
yard, on which the windows of the gentleman looked! The plaintiff
alleged, that this was _so offensive_ to his _wife_ and _daughters_,
that, if the defendant were not compelled to desist, he should be
obliged to _brick up his windows, or to quit the house_! If I had been
the father of these, at once, _delicate_ and _curious_ daughters, I
would not have been the herald of their purity of mind; and if I had
been the suitor of one of them, I would have taken care to give up the
suit with all convenient speed; for how could I reasonably have hoped
ever to be able to prevail on delicacy, _so exquisite_, to commit itself
to a pair of bridal sheets? In spite, however, of all this '_refinement_
in the human mind,' which is everlastingly dinned in our ears; in spite
of the '_small-clothes_,' and of all the other affected stuff, we have
this conclusion, this indubitable _proof_, of the falling off in _real_
delicacy; namely, that common prostitutes, formerly unknown, now swarm
in our towns, and are seldom wanting even in our villages; and where
there was _one_ illegitimate child (including those coming before th