A WOMAN then, lingering in a severe labor, and urged by her pains naturally to wish the speediest end of them, is yet by another superior promptership of nature desirous of meriting the sweet name of mother, and is inclined of herself not to think it over-purchased by a little more patience. In this crisis, much must depend on the judgment, and consequently on the advice of the assistent practitioner, male or female. If a midwife, besides the tenderness constitutional to her sex, her natural fears for the mother especially, not without a due share of concern for the child, where there is a possibility of saving it without too great a risk to the parent, besides the superior execution of her art in points of the manual function, she is moreover bound in all duty to see one labor come to its issue before she undertakes another; for the sake of which, she cannot well, if she would, without instruments, prematurely force a delivery by such violent, dangerous and so often destructive means. She will then in course encourage and inspirit her charge with patience, and use all the blandishments, soothing methods imaginable to comfort, relieve, and strengthen the resolution and spirit of the lying-in-woman. Now, a man-midwife, _well paid_, will perhaps in that cold unaffectionate manner, with which a duty that has no foundation but in interest is ever performed, exhort to endurance that patient whom his dexterity is insufficient to relieve, that patient whose pains are perhaps for the greatest part his own fault. But should he, during some lingering labor, be called elsewhere, to a more rich employer, or should one from whom he has greater expectations, require an attendance from him incompatible with his duty to his prior employer, is not here a temptation to make a quick dispatch with his instruments? A temptation to which it is at least doubtful whether a man, actuated by interest, may not be over-inclined to yield. It may even byass him, without his perceiving it himself. A man’s determining motive, when it is not of a very justifiable nature, is often skreened even from himself by a more specious one. Such, in the present case, is the saving the mother, oftenest by destroying, and sometimes by only galling, bruising, or maiming the child, when the mother rarely escapes her share of the suffering. How many mothers have pathetically interceded, and interceded in vain, for a respite of execution, when the operator has in a peremptory tone cut short their instances, by telling them in a magisterial way, that he knew best what to do, and could not answer for the patient’s life, if the operation was longer delayed! What reply has a poor woman, weak by nature, oppressed by pain, and subdued by her prepossession to oppose to such an argument of necessity, of which her own life appears to be the favored object? What husband, what friends, but must unhesitatingly subscribe to so just a preference as that of the