s the existence
of love, and subjected to the atmosphere of that disenchantment which
follows on possession, ought naturally to be the most firmly-welded of
all human unions.

A woman then ought never to reproach her husband for the legal right,
in virtue of which she belongs to him. She ought not to find in this
compulsory submission any excuse for yielding to a lover, because some
time after her marriage she has discovered in her own heart a traitor
whose sophisms seduce her by asking twenty times an hour, "Wherefore,
since she has been given against her will to a man whom she does not
love, should she not give herself, of her own free-will, to a man
whom she does love." A woman is not to be tolerated in her complaints
concerning faults inseparable from human nature. She has, in advance,
made trial of the tyranny which they exercise, and taken sides with the
caprices which they exhibit.

A great many young girls are likely to be disappointed in their hopes of
love!--But will it not be an immense advantage to them to have escaped
being made the companions of men whom they would have had the right to
despise?

Certain alarmists will exclaim that such an alteration in our manners
would bring about a public dissoluteness which would be frightful; that
the laws, and the customs which prompt the laws, could not after all
authorize scandal and immorality; and if certain unavoidable abuses do
exist, at least society ought not to sanction them.

It is easy to say, in reply, first of all, that the proposed system
tends to prevent those abuses which have been hitherto regarded as
incapable of prevention; but, the calculations of our statistics,
inexact as they are, have invariably pointed out a widely prevailing
social sore, and our moralists may, therefore, be accused of preferring
the greater to the lesser evil, the violation of the principle on which
society is constituted, to the granting of a certain liberty to girls;
and dissoluteness in mothers of families, such as poisons the springs of
public education and brings unhappiness upon at least four persons, to
dissoluteness in a young girl, which only affects herself or at the
most a child besides. Let the virtue of ten virgins be lost rather than
forfeit this sanctity of morals, that crown of honor with which the
mother of a family should be invested! In the picture presented by
a young girl abandoned by her betrayer, there is something imposing,
something indescribabl