r; or an honest girl, who does not
turn wanton like her mother. For, really, maternity has its sacred
duties, and the wretches who trample them under foot are unnatural
mothers, who deserve an exemplary and notable punishment; as a proof of
which, gentlemen of the jury, I beg you will unhesitatingly hand over
this miserable woman to the executioner, and you will thus do your duty
like independent, firm, and enlightened citizens. _Dixi!_' 'This
gentleman looks at the question in a very moral point of view,' will say
some hatmaker or retired furrier, who is foreman of the jury; 'he has
done, i'faith, what we should all have done in his place; for the girl
is very pretty, though rather pallid in complexion. This gay spark, as
the song says:

"'"Has kissed and has prattled with fifty fair maids,
And changed them as oft, do you see;"

and there is no law against that. As to this unfortunate girl, after
all, it is her own fault! Why did she not repulse him? Then she would
not have committed a crime,--a monstrous crime! which really puts all
society to the blush.' And the hatter or the furrier would be
right,--perfectly right. What is there to criminate this gentleman? Of
what complicity, direct or indirect, moral or material, can he be
charged? This lucky rogue has seduced a pretty girl, and he it is who
has brought her there; he does not deny it; where is the law that
prevents or punishes him? Society merely says: There are gay young
fellows abroad,--let the pretty girls beware! But if a poor wretch,
through want or stupidity, constraint, or ignorance of the laws which he
cannot read, buys knowingly a rag which has been stolen, he will be sent
to the galleys for twenty years as a receiver, if such be the punishment
for the theft itself. This is logical, powerful reasoning,--'Without
receivers there would be no thieves, without thieves there would be no
receivers.' No, no more pity, then--even less pity--for him who excites
to the evil than he who perpetrates it. Let the smallest degree of
complicity be visited with terrible punishment! Good; there is in that a
serious and fertile thought, high and moral. We should bow before
Society which had dictated such a law; but we remember that this
Society, so inexorable towards the smallest complicity of crime against
things, is so framed that a simple and ingenuous man, who should try to
prove that there is at least moral similarity, material complicity,
between t