the list. In the three first months of the year 1793 the number of
divorces in that city amounted to 562; the marriages were 1785: so that
the proportion of divorces to marriages was not much less than one to
three: a thing unexampled, I believe, among mankind. I caused an inquiry
to be made at Doctors' Commons concerning the number of divorces, and
found that all the divorces (which, except by special act of Parliament,
are separations, and not proper divorces) did not amount in all those
courts, and in an hundred years, to much more than one fifth of those
that passed in the single city of Paris in three months. I followed up
the inquiry relative to that city through several of the subsequent
months, until I was tired, and found the proportions still the same.
Since then I have heard that they have declared for a revisal of these
laws: but I know of nothing done. It appears as if the contract that
renovates the world was under no law at all. From this we may take our
estimate of the havoc that has been made through all the relations of
life. With the Jacobins of France, vague intercourse is without
reproach; marriage is reduced to the vilest concubinage; children are
encouraged to cut the throats of their parents; mothers are taught that
tenderness is no part of their character, and, to demonstrate their
attachment to their party, that they ought to make no scruple to rake
with their bloody hands in the bowels of those who came from their own.

To all this let us join the practice of _cannibalism_, with which, in
the proper terms, and with the greatest truth, their several factions
accuse each other. By cannibalism I mean their devouring, as a nutriment
of their ferocity, some part of the bodies of those they have murdered,
their drinking the blood of their victims, and forcing the victims
themselves to drink the blood of their kindred slaughtered before their
faces. By cannibalism I mean also to signify all their nameless,
unmanly, and abominable insults on the bodies of those they slaughter.

As to those whom they suffer to die a natural death, they do not permit
them to enjoy the last consolations of mankind, or those rights of
sepulture which indicate hope, and which mere Nature has taught to
mankind, in all countries, to soothe the afflictions and to cover the
infirmity of mortal condition. They disgrace men in the entry into life,
they vitiate and enslave them through the whole course of it, and they
deprive th