"Although the easiness of the art of midwifery might have been, among the ancients, a motive for intrusting it to women, they also doubtless had a regard for natural propriety, which suggested that the infant, on coming into the world, should be received into the hands of a midwife, to pass into those of a nurse, and from the hands of the nurse into those of a governess, who should prepare him to receive from men a masculine education. A repository so weak and so delicate would perhaps have found, in the rough and unbending kindness of the latter, aid less adapted to its state; it required a gentle and yielding support, knowing how to be pliant as itself, the better to defend it. In fine, the care of infancy is the destination of women; it is a task which nature has assigned them. It is woman who must bear the infant during nine months in her womb; _it is woman who ought to facilitate the means of its exit_; it is woman who should furnish the first nourishment which it requires; in fine, it is woman who should keep watch over the first developments of its organs and of its mind, and prepare it for the lessons which should elevate it to the condition of man. But the principal reason which, among the ancients, forbade the belief that the duty of aiding delivery could be proper to any but women, excepting in cases of very rare occurrence, where every consideration might necessarily yield to a pressing danger, was the grand interest of manners.[50] This was an object to which ancient governments had always special regard.[51] They knew morality to be the foundation of all legislation, and that good laws would be made in vain, unless good morals insured their execution. The cruelty of Archagathus' surgical operations drove the medical men from Rome. She banished also from her bosom the Greek philosophers and orators, who were accused of having introduced and cultivated the taste for the arts and vices of Greece. She would surely not have permitted, for any length of time, the existence of _an art which, practised by men, would, under the specious pretence of utility, threaten the sanctuary of marriage_, and which, striking a blow at the chief safeguard of families, would next attack the mainsprings of the state; an art which, _with power to alarm the modesty of women, would soon leave them without a blush_, and cause them to lose even the recollection of that severe virtue which had merited the respect and veneration of the Romans, and which of old had been the principle of the grandest revolutions. Cato, always careful to protect the hearts of the citizens from corruption, would never have permitted their wives, when presenting children to the republic, to tarnish the favour by a forgetfulness of the first of all decencies. All nations were sufficiently agreed, up to the middle of the last century, never to admit the agency of men in delivery. M. Astruc[52] alleges that it was not until 1663 that