"The rest of the case for allowing multiple wives, just for completeness's sake, is that rich men will - barring really very exceptional virtue and good luck of circumstances - not be faithful to their wives, and they will either take second wives or mistresses, and I think both of these typically involve wronging people but the mistresses more inevitably and irredressably so."

"What is it that gets into rich men specifically?" asks Soler incredulously.

Ow.

"I don't know. I don't think it is inevitable, people are perfectly capable of living lives to this standard of virtue and even to higher ones, but I think we're talking about - four rich men in five, who'll take a mistress or a second wife, not the worst third of them. In countries that are not Asmodean Cheliax."

"Which is why the penalty we're looking at is a pure fine," she observes, looking at Llei.

- oh, right, because he suggested that. "Yes. Compensation, I think, is doable. Anything that seems aimed at prevention, among the wealthy, will not pass the floor."

"On the topic of the correct size of fine, I think it is reasonable to be concerned nobility will overestimate the correct size of the fine. Ideally we would like something significant but not ruinous for a professional such as a skilled craftsman, say a cabinetmaker who has finished his journeying but not achieved a high rank in his town's guild. And which remains meaningful for those more wealthy than that but is not, as the Count-Regent says, preventative. Delegate Roig, Fiducia, does thirty gold seem approximately correct, say within a factor of three, for that goal?"

"Approximately, at least, though prices are very much in flux and who knows if it will still be at all reasonable a year from now, much less ten or more. I am still concerned, however, with the case when a man is both poor and already married to another woman."

Well, she still hates Delegate Napaciza and wishes he was dead, and she keeps getting distracted from the meeting imagining hurting him like he tried to hurt Valia, but if he got the amount of money right then he got the amount of money right.

"So I think that ties back to something I was saying on the first day we met, about how we were kind of solving two problems at once, punishing the father for hurting the mother and their child, and making sure the child is okay. And it seems like that's a situation where there's lots of ways to do the first thing that don't require indenturing them, but there's probably not a way to do the second thing just by fining or indenturing the father, if his family doesn't get enough to eat because he's been indentured to pay for a different kid you haven't really helped anything. But I don't know how to fix that, if he doesn't have enough money in the first place to pay for all the kids and he needs to work so his first family has enough to eat."

"So - I don't know whether this defeats the whole purpose, but I want to point out that a huge number of single women who are unemployed and starving with young children now were previously getting along even without men. Two years ago, a lot of them were relying on daycare services, from orphanages that were better-run and safer than they are now, and a huge number of them were gainfully employed. A lot of married women were, too. I worry that shutting down daycare services was part of what made everyone poorer, because, like, thirty percent of work in the cities stopped being done, or something. I don't know if there's a way to allow those who want to work to work again. But we should be thinking about it as an element of the equation, and not assuming that any woman who doesn't have a man in the picture or another woman to live with is necessarily going to end up homeless and starving. Maybe if most of the women are married, it's affordable to do limited daycares for women whose husbands have been sentenced to indenture or conscripted or something."

"Sounds like a problem for the reconvention in forty years, when they get to see how this works out."

" - well, maybe, but actually I think a major element of the current problem is that a lot of the women of today are used to earning their own bread, and right now they can't, so everything is in a state of crisis. I'm not just saying that daycares are nice and that it's nice for women to be able to work, though it is. I'm saying - things have been bad, but the reason they're collapsing right now is that they had a system, and we shut it down. And if we have something that will improve things in most circumstances and move us away from having so many abandoned children, but it and needs a small patch so that it doesn't ruin people who didn't do anything wrong, maybe we can just include a patch for it."

"It seems to me that it would be good to have a charity that supports widows and impoverished wives of criminals but I am not sure why that support should take the form of paying other people to watch their children instead of pensioning them so they can do it."

"I think adequately funded daycares are good because they let women who are suited to a profession pursue it, but maybe pensioning them is simpler? I guess if we pension them they can just pay for childcare, if there's something else they're much better served by doing. I'm slightly worried that if we directly compensate people then we're going to hear about some poor man deliberately indenturing himself so his wife gets support, but maybe there's a number where that doesn't happen."

"That does seem like it is likely to happen wherever various efforts to provide benefits happen but I think starting out there would probably not be enough funding for it to be decisive for many people."

"All right, so maybe if the man is already married we make him face the same penalties as someone else, and we separately have some kind of program to support women whose husbands are indentured for crimes, to take the sting out. That - is, technically, an incentive to marry, I guess. And if he impregnates six women and the term is twelve years or something, maybe we make some amount of indenture or criminal action grounds for divorce, if she wants that."

"I suspect funding care for children would be both cheaper and more reliable at seeing the children taken care of, given the general state of the people of Cheliax. Not to say that the orphanages are presently good care, as Delegate Tallandria made very clear last week, but if they can be staffed adequately and supervised by Good churches, I think we could achieve a good standard of care, and I worry many Chelish mothers do not love their children well enough to achieve that if supplied with money intended for that purpose. Perhaps there is an Abadaran means of assessing the benefit for the mother and the child separately?"

"Mothers love their children and are almost always the best person to care for them, certainly much better than even extraordinarily well-run orphanages."

"The orphanages are hellholes. I don't know what they'd be like if you opened a portal to the elemental plane of gold and quintupled their budgets but they would not be families."

Victòria looks incredibly confused about something Fazil said but hasn't managed to turn that into a question yet.

"Most mothers love their children. If they didn't, they wouldn't keep them, and most of them do, even after the father leaves. They may not love them well, but neither do I, not even at my well-rested best.

I do think that there's is a very big difference between leaving a child at an orphanage forever and leaving him there for a few hours. Most children who used daytime daycare two years ago had mothers, and many had fathers, too. They would drop them off in the morning, and pick them up in the evening, like for school. Sometimes an older sibling would pick them up in the afternoon when school let out. Following the fall of Egorian, daycare services were suspended, and the rebuilt orphanages now serve only children who have been utterly abandoned, with a quarter as much use and a tenth as much staffing. I'm not going to tell you they used to be nice, because they weren't, but in many cases daycare services were what allowed a mother to keep a child."

"Oh, if you just meant children should be raised by mothers who care about them enough to keep them that makes sense, I was thinking — I don't know how I'd tell, and it doesn't really seem like it would've helped anything that happened to me growing up if she felt different — but she didn't smother me even though it would've made things a lot easier for her, and I agree that that's better than if she had. 

...Uh, anyways, I didn't grow up in the cities, but the daycares sound kind of like... when a bunch of women with really little kids take turns about watching them so they can all get their work done, which we did have back home. And I don't really see why that would be a problem even if it meant most people weren't usually being watched by their mother? But I'm still not sure I understood you right."

"It's very normal for children to be watched by siblings, or cousins, or neighbors, and doing that for pay isn't a problem. I just am bothered by the idea that the hope is to get the children away from their mothers to a state or church-run institution. That seems like a tragic last resort, to me, and not in the children's interests even if their mothers are products of Asmodean Cheliax."

"....is there some way to, like, encourage people to pool together and watch each other's kids even if the state isn't doing it directly? I don't know how much it would help the unemployment situation, but - a lot of people don't trust each other, see, and if you leave the baby at the government daycare all day you at least get a baby back at the end of it."

"I surely could not trust any of my cousins or nieces to watch my children, not that I personally need to. I doubt most of my duchy's families could either, though my ancestral county is better. Church orphanages could be made more reliable."