lost the polar star of their
pathway." (225.)

After this declamation he proceeds to put some practical questions to
the embarrassed chaplain. Are young men in France always continent, and
wives always true, and husbands never libertines? The chaplain's answers
disclose the truth to the keen-eyed Orou:

"What a monstrous tissue is this that thou art unfolding to me! And
even now thou dost not tell me all; for as soon as men allow
themselves to dispose at their own will of the ideas of what is
just and unjust, to take away, or to impose an arbitrary character
on things; to unite to actions or to separate from them the good
and the evil, with no counsellor save caprice--then come blame,
accusation, suspicion, tyranny, envy, jealousy, deception, chagrin,
concealment, dissimulation, espionage, surprise, lies; daughters
deceive their parents, wives their husbands, husbands their wives;
young women, I don't doubt, will smother their children; suspicious
fathers will despise and neglect their children; mothers will leave
them to the mercy of accident; and crime and debauchery will show
themselves in every guise. I know all that, as if I had lived among
you. It is so, because it must be so; and that society of thine, in
spite of thy chief who vaunts its fine order, is nothing but a
collection of hypocrites who secretly trample the laws under foot;
or of unfortunate wretches who make themselves the instrument of
their own punishment, by submitting to these laws; or of imbeciles,
in whom prejudice has absolutely stifled the voice of nature."
(227.)

The chaplain has the presence of mind to fall back upon the radical
difficulty of all such solutions of the problem of family union as were
practised in Otaheite, or were urged by philosophers in Paris, or are
timidly suggested in our own times in the droll-sounding form of
marriages for terms of years with option of renewal. That difficulty is
the disposal of the children which are the fruit of such unions. Orou
rejoins to this argument by a very eloquent account how valuable, how
sought after, how prized, is the woman who has her quiver full of them.
His contempt for the condition of Europe grows more intense, as he
learns that the birth of a child among the bulk of the people of the
west is rather a sorrow, a perplexity, a hardship, than a delight and
ground of congratulatio