arison between the
danger of giving liberty to girls and that of allowing it to wives?
The idea of taking a young girl on trial makes more serious men think
than fools laugh. The manners of Germany, of Switzerland, of England
and of the United States give to young ladies such rights as in France
would be considered the subversion of all morality; and yet it is
certain that in these countries there are fewer unhappy marriages than
in France.

LV.
"Before a woman gives herself entirely up to her lover, she ought to
consider well what his love has to offer her. The gift of her esteem
and confidence should necessarily precede that of her heart."

Sparkling with truth as they are, these lines probably filled with
light the dungeon, in the depths of which Mirabeau wrote them; and the
keen observation which they bear witness to, although prompted by the
most stormy of his passions, has none the less influence even now in
solving the social problem on which we are engaged. In fact, a
marriage sealed under the auspices of the religious scrutiny which
assumes the existence of love, and subjected to the atmosphere of that
disenchantment which follows on possession, ought naturally to be the
most firmly-welded of all human unions.

A woman then ought never to reproach her husband for the legal right,
in virtue of which she belongs to him. She ought not to find in this
compulsory submission any excuse for yielding to a lover, because some
time after her marriage she has discovered in her own heart a traitor
whose sophisms seduce her by asking twenty times an hour, "Wherefore,
since she has been given against her will to a man whom she does not
love, should she not give herself, of her own free-will, to a man whom
she does love." A woman is not to be tolerated in her complaints
concerning faults inseparable from human nature. She has, in advance,
made trial of the tyranny which they exercise, and taken sides with
the caprices which they exhibit.

A great many young girls are likely to be disappointed in their hopes
of love!--But will it not be an immense advantage to them to have
escaped being made the companions of men whom they would have had the
right to despise?

Certain alarmists will exclaim that such an alteration in our manners
would bring about a public dissoluteness which would be frightful;
that the laws, and the customs which prompt the laws, could not after
all authorize scanda