Paternal love. If human reason, or rather the abuse one makes of it, does not sometimes serve to corrupt his instinct, we would have the license to say this about fatherly love . Brutes do not need our moral faculties to learn to love their young, to nourish them, to raise them. For they are guided only by instinct. Now when instinct is in no way distracted by the heady sophisms of reason and when it consistently responds to the bidding of nature, it does what it has to do and never complains. Thus if man were in this way comparable to the animals, as soon as the child had seen the light, his mother would feed him with her own milk, tend to all of his needs, keep him safe from all accidents, and would not believe for one moment of her life better fulfilled than when she was employed in these important duties. The father for his part would contribute to the education of the child; he would study his tastes, his temper, and his inclinations in so that he might use his talents profitably. He would personally cultivate this young plant, and would regard the abandonment of the child to an ignorant caregiver as an act of criminal or even vicious indifference.

But the power of custom, in spite of the force of instinct, dictates a completely different scenario. Hardly is the child born, when he is separated forever from his mother. She is either too weak or too delicate. Her condition is such that she cannot honestly nurse her own child. In vain, nature has turned away the flow of the liquid that would have nourished it in the bosom of the mother and carried these two streams of milk to the mammaries of the harsh stepmother where the child is now destined to take on its subsistence . Nature will not be heeded in the slightest; her benefits will be rejected and despised . The mother nature has endowed, inevitably as a result of her own action, dries up this source of benevolent nectar. The child will be delivered to a borrowed, mercenary mother who measures its needs according to the profit she expects from meeting them.

Who then is the mother who would agree to receive from someone a child who can never be hers? Will this newborn that the mother relegates far from her be really truly hers, when after several years, the continual loss of substance that at each instant creates a living body through the infusion of an exotic milk, transforms him into a new person? This milk that he has sucked was in no way intended for his organs. Thus it has been for him a nourishment less profitable than would have been the milk of his mother. Who knows if his original robust and healthy temperament has not in any way been altered? Who knows if this transformation has not influenced his heart, his soul, and his body so dependent on one another ! Who knows if he will not become one day, precisely for this reason, a coward, an evil doer, and a deceitful person? The most delicious fruit in the land, perfectly suitable for him, cannot help but degenerate if it is transported by another.

We can compare a king to the father of a family, and for a reason. This comparison is based on the nature and the origin of royalty.

so says one of our great poets ( Merope, the tragedy by Voltaire ); but it is well to note that it is in the mouth of a tyrant, a usurper, a murderer of his king that he puts this maxim. It is unworthy to have been pronounced by a just prince. It is completely different than what Poliphonte would have said:

A father is naturally the head of his family. When a family multiplies, it becomes a people, and as a consequence the father of the family becomes a king. The oldest son has no doubt that he inherits the authority of his father and thus the scepter is passed on in the same household until such time as a happy soldier or a subject rebels and becomes the stem of a new race .

We can compare a king and a father with each other and thereby determine the duties of the monarch by those of the head of a family, and the obligations of a father by those of a sovereign: to love, to govern, to reward, and to punish . This I believe is everything that one does as a father and a king.

A father who has no love for his children is a monster. A king who does not love his subjects is a tyrant. The father and the king are, the one and the other, living images of God whose empire is founded on love. Nature has made fathers for the advantage of children. Society has made kings for the happiness of the people. A family and a state must necessarily have a head. But if this head is indifferent to its members, in his eyes they will be only be instruments made for helping him to be happy. On the other hand, to treat one’s family or one’s state with generosity is to provide for his own interest. Whatever the principal seat of life or feeling, the head is always poorly situated on a meager or emaciated trunk.

There is the same parity between the government of a family and that of the state. The master who rules the one or the other has two objectives to fulfill. The first is to assure the rule of morality, virtue, and piety. The other is to keep trouble, disasters, and poverty at a distance. It is the love of order that must lead and not a passion to dominate that exploits docility.

The power to reward and punish is the essential nerve of government. God himself would command nothing without the fright of threats and the invitation of promises. The two motivations of the human heart are the mind and fear. Fathers and kings, you have in your hands all that is necessary for activating these two passions. But be aware that exact justice is as careful in reward as it is in punishment. God has established you on earth as his substitutes and his representatives; yet not uniquely to thunder here, but also to spread benevolent rains and dews.

Paternal love is no different than self esteem . A child exists only through his parents. He depends on them, comes from them, and owes them everything. There is nothing they can really call their own. So it is that a father never separates the idea of his son from the notion of possession , unless or until the son weakens this idea of the established order by some kind of contradiction. But the more a father is irritated by this contradiction, the more he is afflicted by it, and the more he proves what I have been saying.