is no difference between them. No: they bring forth children in such sorrow that it often costs them life itself.
Is this true?
20. But the woman of the higher class may say: "I have not time for maternal duties. They would take me from urgent affairs of state, and occasion more loss than profit. And then, why should I descend to the level of the meanest peasant? Let me rather pay another with gold to undertake this duty for me, or I will buy a new-born child which will belong to me as though it were my own." Can she do this, and carry out such plans?[1]
21. No, that cannot be done; we cannot change the order established by God.
You may give all the treasures in the world to purchase a child, but it will not then be your own. It never has been yours, and never can be. It belongs only to its own mother.
It is the same with the question of food. A man may neglect the duty of laboring for bread, he may buy a loaf with money; but that loaf
- ↑ Bondareff's ideas, as given above, have inspired several passages in Tolstoï's What should he done.
"Thou shall earn thy bread, he says (page 216 of the French translation), in the sweat of thy face, and thou shall bring forth children in sorrow.
"But we have changed all that! as exclaimed Molière's character, who proclaimed that the liver is on the left side. Men no longer must labor for food: that will be done by machinery; and women need no longer bear children. The world will not now be overcrowded with people."
