o help them, yet encourages their unconscionable hopes; but
he is thought the worse of if he be sharp of tongue, sour in appearance,
and displays his wealth in an invidious fashion. For men respect and
yet loathe a fortunate man, and hate him for doing what, if they had the
chance, they would do themselves.

* * * * * * *

Men nowadays no longer secretly, but openly outrage the wives of others,
and allow to others access to their own wives. A match is thought
countrified, uncivilized, in bad style, and to be protested against by
all matrons, if the husband should forbid his wife to appear in
public in a litter, and to be carried about exposed to the gaze of all
observers. If a man has not made himself notorious by a LIAISON with
some mistress, if he does not pay an annuity to some one else's wife,
married women speak of him as a poor-spirited creature, a man given
to low vice, a lover of servant girls. Soon adultery becomes the most
respectable form of marriage, and widowhood and celibacy are commonly
practised. No one takes a wife unless he takes her away from some one
else. Now men vie with one another in wasting what they have stolen, and
in collecting together what they have wasted with the keenest avarice;
they become utterly reckless, scorn poverty in others, fear personal
injury more than anything else, break the peace by their riots, and by
violence and terror domineer over those who are weaker than themselves.
No wonder that they plunder provinces and offer the seat of judgment for
sale, knocking it down after an auction to the highest bidder, since it
is the law of nations that you may sell what you have bought.

X. However, my enthusiasm has carried me further than I intended, the
subject being an inviting one. Let me, then, end by pointing out that
the disgrace of these crimes does not belong especially to our own time.
Our ancestors before us have lamented, and our children after us will
lament, as we do, the ruin, of morality, the prevalence of vice, and
the gradual deterioration of mankind; yet these things are really
stationary, only moved slightly to and fro like the waves which at
one time a rising tide washes further over the land, and at another an
ebbing one restrains within a lower water mark. At one time the chief
vice will be adultery, and licentiousness will exceed all bounds; at
another time a rage for feasting will be in vogue, and men will waste
th