is the richest
and the most advantageous of all possessions?

After all, what is the question before us? For what do you think we
are stipulating? We are making a claim for five or six hundred thousand
maidens, protected by their instinctive timidity, and by the high price
at which they rate themselves; they understand how to defend themselves,
just as well as they know how to sell themselves. The eighteen millions
of human beings, whom we have excepted from this consideration, almost
invariably contract marriages in accordance with the system which we
are trying to make paramount in our system of manners; and as to the
intermediary classes by which we poor bimana are separated from the men
of privilege who march at the head of a nation, the number of castaway
children which these classes, although in tolerably easy circumstances,
consign to misery, goes on increasing since the peace, if we may believe
M. Benoiston de Chateauneuf, one of the most courageous of those savants
who have devoted themselves to the arid yet useful study of statistics.
We may guess how deep-seated is the social hurt, for which we propound
a remedy, if we reckon the number of natural children which statistics
reveal, and the number of illicit adventures whose evidence in high
society we are forced to suspect. But it is difficult here to make quite
plain all the advantages which would result from the emancipation of
young girls. When we come to observe the circumstances which attend a
marriage, such as our present manners approve of, judicious minds must
appreciate the value of that system of education and liberty, which we
demand for young girls, in the name of reason and nature. The prejudice
which we in France entertain in favor of the virginity of brides is the
most silly of all those which still survive among us. The Orientals take
their brides without distressing themselves about the past and lock them
up in order to be more certain about the future; the French put
their daughters into a sort of seraglio defended by their mothers, by
prejudice, and by religious ideas, and give the most complete liberty
to their wives, thus showing themselves much more solicitous about a
woman's past than about her future. The point we are aiming at is to
bring about a reversal of our system of manners. If we did so we should
end, perhaps, by giving to faithful married life all the flavor and the
piquancy which women of to-day find in acts of infidelity.