8. Between the bastard and his mother, there is no justice, say you. Your conscience is younger by two thousand and some hundred years than the modern conscience. In the work of reproduction, the task to be performed with reference to the new being, is divided between the parents. On the woman, as the more vital, more elastic, and more resisting, devolves the more perilous part of this task. You shall risk your life to form humanity from your own substance, says Nature to her. To the man it belongs to pay his debt to his children by erecting the roof under which they take shelter, by bringing the food which you elaborate or prepare for them. To him it belongs to accomplish his duty towards his sons by the use of his strength, as you accomplish yours by supplying them with your blood and your milk.
Your rights over the child arise, adds conscience, from his incapacity to take care of himself, from the duties which you fulfil towards him, from the obligation under which you are placed to form his reason and conscience, and to make him a useful and moral citizen.
Well, what happens most of the time, in cases of illegitimacy? That the father having weakly, cruelly, contrary to all justice, deserted his task, the mother performs double duty towards her children: she is at once father and mother.
And it is when this mother has a double right that you dare to say that she has none! that between her and her son there is no justice! In truth, I should rather live among savages than in a society that thinks and feels like you.
A mother has an incontestable right over her child, for she has risked her own life to give it birth: the father acquires rights over it only when ever he fulfils his duty; when he does not fulfil it, he has no right; thus says reason. In this question, marriage signifies nothing. If I were illegitimate, and my father had basely abandoned me, I should despise and hate him as the executioner of my mother; as a man without heart and conscience, a vile egotist; and I should doubly love and respect her who had been at once my mother and my father. Such are the dictates of my conscience, my reason, and my heart.
9. What is your marriage, the first form given by Nature to the religion of the human race, in which woman is an idol who does the cooking and mends the stockings of her priest?
What is this institution, in which man is reputed to defend his wife and children with his sword, whom the law defends, even against him?
In which man is reputed to support by his labor those who often labor more than he, or who bring him a dowry?
The wife and children are under the jurisdiction of the tribunal of man! May the gods preserve us from this frightful return to the manners and customs of the patriarchs and Romans. Women and children are under the jurisdiction of the social tribunal, and it is safer for them: the French wife has not at least to fear that her Abraham will sacrifice her little Isaac, nor that her domestic despot, leaving the child on the ground, like the ancient Roman, will thus condemn it to death. Society has a heart and generous proctors who, happily, no longer see the family tribunal in the same light as Proudhon. It is true that our author is an Epimenides, awaking after a sleep of more than two thousand years.
I have finished, Master; have you anything more to say?