A free translation of which reads:
We will walk in the sun, boys, with ease,
We will cover our bodies with grease,
For poverty there is no need.
We’ll all get as drunk as a loon,
We’ll swap our wives every noon,
And thus be true freemen indeed.
“It is inconceivable”, I said, “that men, proudly considering themselves the crown of creation, or if they do not believe in God, at least considering themselves intellectual free-thinkers, can breed in their brains such horrid theories. I should deplore the fate of womanhood if these theories should ever become victorious, if free love in this damnable form should ever be proclaimed; or if the nursing and education of children should be taken away from the mothers and entrusted to others”.
“I should consider it the most terrible blow ever aimed at humanity if the nursing and the first education of the young children should be transferred from their mothers to other persons. No women or men, however good and noble they may be, can feel the love and the patience for a child that fills a mother’s heart. The ties that bind women and men together, marriage and the family, are institutions which even our communistic Solons have so far respected. Humanity is doomed to barbarism on the day family life is broken up, when mothers are separated from their children, when men are alienated from the constantly elevating influence of good women, when the relations of men and women are stripped of that sublimity conferred upon matrimonial life by the permanent exchange of feelings and thoughts, when these relations are degraded to nothing but sexual intercourse. Nearly all our good qualities can be traced back to the influence the unfathomable love and patience of the mother, in her efforts to make her beloved child good and true, have exercised upon our minds and hearts. Nearly all great men had good mothers. There is nothing on earth that could compensate a child for the loss of its mother, or that could indemnify humanity for the loss of the beneficial influence mothers have on the growing generation”.
“Do you suppose that your Radicals will ever have power enough to dethrone the mothers and to abolish matrimonial life”? I asked, with great curiosity.