Physiology, 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.
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