ssional body
consisting of female Decii who devote themselves for the republic,
and make a rampart of their bodies round the honest families? The
legislators have been very wrong hitherto in disdaining to regulate the
lot of courtesans.

XXIII.
The courtesan is an institution if she is a necessity.

This question bristles with so many ifs and buts that we will bequeath
it for solution to our descendants; it is right that we shall leave them
something to do. Moreover, its discussion is not germane to this work;
for in this, more than in any other age, there is a great outburst of
sensibility; at no other epoch have there been so many rules of conduct,
because never before has it been so completely accepted that pleasure
comes from the heart. Now, what man of sentiment is there, what celibate
is there, who, in the presence of four hundred thousand young and pretty
women arrayed in the splendors of fortune and the graces of wit, rich in
treasures of coquetry, and lavish in the dispensing of happiness, would
wish to go--? For shame!

Let us put forth for the benefit of our future legislature in clear and
brief axioms the result arrived at during the last few years.

XXIV.
In the social order, inevitable abuses are laws of nature, in
accordance with which mankind should frame their civil and political
institutes.

XXV.
"Adultery is like a commercial failure, with this difference," says
Chamfort, "that it is the innocent party who has been ruined and who
bears the disgrace."

In France the laws that relate to adultery and those that relate to
bankruptcy require great modifications. Are they too indulgent? Do they
sin on the score of bad principles? _Caveant consules_!

Come now, courageous athlete, who have taken as your task that which is
expressed in the little apostrophe which our first Meditation addresses
to people who have the charge of a wife, what are you going to say about
it? We hope that this rapid review of the question does not make you
tremble, that you are not one of those men whose nervous fluid congeals
at the sight of a precipice or a boa constrictor! Well! my friend, he
who owns soil has war and toil. The men who want your gold are more
numerous than those who want your wife.

After all, husbands are free to take these trifles for arithmetical
estima