I wish then that those, who too readily admit that this so recent a fashion of employing men-midwives preferable to female ones, is an improvement receivable on the foot of its supposed advantage to human kind, would consider a little the actual consequences of having flown in the face of Nature with respect to the bringing up young children, in a way scarce more foreign from her dictates, than that of _men_ delivering _women_. That women are by Nature herself formed for the office of aiding women in their lying-in; that they are also formed to bring up children by the breast, are two parts of their destination by Nature, which in all ages, and in all countries seem to have born little or no controversy. Interest has lately invaded both these provinces. With this difference, that as to the first, that of women supplanted in their business of delivering women, an active interest has prevailed; as in that of denying the female breast to children, it is a purely passive one[19]; and we shall soon see what a dreadful effect this sacrifice of Nature to interest has produced. AS to the mischief produced by the other, of the implicitly excluding the women from midwifery, by the power of prejudice and fashion, it is not, as yet, of a Nature for obvious reasons quite so susceptible of proof, though most certainly not the less therefore existent. And that mischief is palpably owing to the gain which the men-midwives find or presume in the exercise of that profession. This is the active interest: that end to which the means give so justly the construction of base and sordid. The rich are the object of this wretched imposition, which will probably last so much the longer, for the interest to be found in imposing upon them. BUT for the denying the female breast to children; it has not indeed passed hitherto into a tenet, that children may as well be reared by the spoon as by the breast, because there is not that prospect of the place of a _dry-nurse_ being as lucrative as that of a _man-midwife_. If it was so, I should not dispair of seeing a great he-fellow florishing a pap-spoon as well as a forceps, or of the public being enlightened by learned tracts and disputations, stuffed full of Greek and Latin technical terms, to prove, that water-gruel or scotch-porridge was a much more healthy aliment for new-born infants than the milk of the female breast, and that is was safer for a man to dandle a baby than for an insignificant woman. AS this unnatural treatment then of children is almost entirely as yet confined to the very poor, that is to say, to new-born babes thrown upon the public CHARITY for their SUSTENANCE, the rearing by the spoon is not yet regularly established as a general _doctrine_, it is only admitted in PRACTICE! As _proper_ wet-nurses, from the difficulty in procuring them, might be _dearer_ than dry ones; the _cheapest_ method is preferred, and forms a kind of passive interest or saving œconomy.