iology, what must I take you to mean?

Do you reveal new principles? Would you pretend that it is the right
thing that woman should be made common? Lycurgus and certain Greek
peoples as well as Tartars and savages have tried this.

Can it possibly be right to confine women? The Ottomans once did so, and
nowadays they give them their liberty.

Would it be right to marry young women without providing a dowry and
yet exclude them from the right of succeeding to property? Some English
authors and some moralists have proved that this with the admission of
divorce is the surest method of rendering marriage happy.

Should there be a little Hagar in each marriage establishment? There is
no need to pass a law for that. The provision of the code which makes
an unfaithful wife liable to a penalty in whatever place the crime
be committed, and that other article which does not punish the
erring husband unless his concubine dwells beneath the conjugal roof,
implicitly admits the existence of mistresses in the city.

Sanchez has written a dissertation on the penal cases incident to
marriage; he has even argued on the illegitimacy and the opportuneness
of each form of indulgence; he has outlined all the duties, moral,
religious and corporeal, of the married couple; in short his work would
form twelve volumes in octavo if the huge folio entitled _De Matrimonio_
were thus represented.

Clouds of lawyers have flung clouds of treatises over the legal
difficulties which are born of marriage. There exist several works on
the judicial investigation of impotency.

Legions of doctors have marshaled their legions of books on the subject
of marriage in its relation to medicine and surgery.

In the nineteenth century the _Physiology of Marriage_ is either an
insignificant compilation or the work of a fool written for other fools;
old priests have taken their balances of gold and have weighed the most
trifling scruples of the marriage consciences; old lawyers have put on
their spectacles and have distinguished between every kind of married
transgression; old doctors have seized the scalpel and drawn it over all
the wounds of the subject; old judges have mounted to the bench and have
decided all the cases of marriage dissolution; whole generations have
passed unuttered cries of joy or of grief on the subject, each age has
cast its vote into the urn; the Holy Spirit, poets and writers have
recounted everything from the days of Eve to the Troj