Page:The Relations Tolstoy.pdf/67

 labor, marital relations have the object of impersonal pleasure for procuring a helper, a successor; but in conditions of material ease and superfluity it is only depravity.

... The gardener's wife has again given birth to a child. Again the old midwife came and took the child away, no one knows where. Everyone is dreadfully indignant. The use of measures for the prevention of child-birth doesn't matter, but for this they have no words of condemnation sufficiently strong. To day it has become known that the midwife returned and brought the child back. On the way she joined others who were travelling with similar children. One of these children had a teat placed too deep in its mouth. He drew it into his throat and choked to death. In one day twenty-five similar children were taken to the "House for illegitimate children" in Moscow. Out of that number nine were refused either because they were legitimate or ill. N- went in the morning to admonish the gardener's wife. She, while vehemently defending her husband, said that with their poverty and uncertainty of life she cannot keep her children, and besides she cannot nurse them. In one word -it is inconvenient... Just before this I had been swinging three children foundlings. In general the children are swarming everywhere. They are born, grown up to become drunkards, syphilitics, savages. And at one and the same time people discuss about saving the lives of men and children and about destroying them. But why should one breed savages? What good is it?