270

DOMESTIC MANNEES OF THE PEUSSIANS.

attachment both to the nourisher as well as the nourished(linking the parent with the child as fast as it does the childwith the parent), and so intimately connected with thatinexplicable maternal instinct, which is assuredly a woman'sgreatest glory, that ladies who do not hesitate to deprivetheir offspring of this their special birthright appear to usto have lost all that tenderness of nature, without which awoman is utterly unsexed.

Then the motives which prompt the mother to hand herchild over to a foster-woman betray the grossest selfishnessand meanness of disposition. Either nursing will spoil thelady's figure—or it will interfere with her rest at night—orprevent her going to parties, &c. &c. For such paltryreasons as these the great scheme of Moral Nature is thrownout of its course and the highest duty ignored. For thepoor woman who sells her child's nourishment, there is theexcuse of poverty and temptation — for the rieh who buys it,none but laziness and vanity.

This System of wet-nursing, too, is intimately connectedwith bastardy, since no decent married woman, even in Ger-many (where there is a greater greed for money than in anyother nation with which we are acquainted), likes to seil thenutriment of her own child; and we have been assured bymany respectable people, that the greater portion of the Prus-sian Saug-ammen are women of loose character—whom, never-thelcss, German ladies do not scruple to introduce into theirfamilies, in order to prevent any infantine interference witheither their slumbers or their pleasures.

To English minds, the infant costume of Prussia seemsabout as enlightened as that adopted by the Indian squaws,who convert their babies into kinds of human chrysales,encasing them, as it were, in a hard shell of bandages, that