.

And now that I have got so far, I am almost afraid to say what his
two reasons are, lest I be charged with inventing them. But I will not
retreat now; I will condense them and print them, giving my word that I
am honest and not trying to deceive any one.

1. Young married women are protected from the approaches of the seducer
in New England and vicinity by the diluted remains of a prudence created
by a Puritan law of two hundred years ago, which for a while punished
adultery with death.

2. And young married women of the other forty or fifty States are
protected by laws which afford extraordinary facilities for divorce.

If I have not lost my mind I have accurately conveyed those two Vesuvian
irruptions of philosophy. But the reader can consult Chapter IV. of
'Outre-Mer', and decide for himself. Let us examine this paralyzing
Deduction or Explanation by the light of a few sane facts.

1. This universality of "protection" has existed in our country from the
beginning; before the death penalty existed in New England, and during
all the generations that have dragged by since it was annulled.

2. Extraordinary facilities for divorce are of such recent creation that
any middle-aged American can remember a time when such things had not
yet been thought of.

Let us suppose that the first easy divorce law went into effect
forty years ago, and got noised around and fairly started in business
thirty-five years ago, when we had, say, 25,000,000 of white population.
Let us suppose that among 5,000,000 of them the young married women were
"protected" by the surviving shudder of that ancient Puritan scare--what
is M. Bourget going to do about those who lived among the 20,000,000?
They were clean in their morals, they were pure, yet there was no easy
divorce law to protect them.

Awhile ago I said that M. Bourget's method of truth-seeking--hunting for
it in out-of-the-way places--was new; but that was an error. I
remember that when Leverrier discovered the Milky Way, he and the other
astronomers began to theorize about it in substantially the same fashion
which M. Bourget employs in his seasonings about American social facts
and their origin. Leverrier advanced the hypothesis that the Milky
Way was caused by gaseous protoplasmic emanations from the field of
Waterloo, which, ascending to an altitude determinable by their
own specific gravity, became luminous through the development and
exposure--by the natural processes of