“Other women, nay brutes, might afford it the milk which she refuses; but the solicitude, the tenderness of a mother cannot be supplied.... Would you have mankind return all to their natural duties, begin with the mothers of families; you will be astonished at the change this will produce. Almost every kind of depravation flows successively from this source; the moral order of things is broken, the natural quiet is subverted in our hearts; home is less cheerful and engaging; the affecting sight of a rising family no more attaches the husband nor attracts the eyes of the stranger; the mother is less truly respectable whose children are not about her; families are no longer places of residence; habit no longer enforces the ties of blood; there are no fathers, no mothers, children, brothers, nor sisters; they hardly know, how should they love, each other? Each cares for no one but himself; and when home affords only a melancholy solitude, it is natural for us to seek diversion elsewhere” (17: i, pp. 24-25). This impeachment made upon the depraved condition of the aristocratic home in France of his day fortunately sounds to us somewhat remote, but the appeal he made to the fathers is still to the point for our own generation. “A father, in begetting and providing for his children, has in that discharged but a third part of his obligations. He owes a being to his species, social beings to society, and citizens to the state. Everyone who is capable of paying this triple debt and refuses is, in that respect, criminal; and perhaps is more so when he pays it by halves. He who is incapable of performing the duties of a father has no right to be one. Neither poverty nor business nor personal importance can dispense with parents nursing and educating their children” (17: i, pp. 31-32). Although it is our duty to assist infants and supply their deficiencies, since they are yet physical weaklings, yet “every assistance afforded them should be confined to real utility, without administering anything to the indulgence of their caprice or unreasonable humors” (17: i, p. 70). We must carefully study the meaning of their inarticulate speech and gestures, in order to distinguish between their natural wants and whimsical claims. The principle of the whole matter is “to give children more real liberty and less command; to leave them more to do of themselves than to require of others” (17: i, p. 70). Thus they shall learn to confine their desires to their abilities, and harmony shall be established between the want and the power to satisfy it, the disparity of which is the source of all human miseries. He also speaks of the uselessness and harmfulness of providing elaborate toys, and forcing speech too early upon the child.