is no less so than she. Everything he says, everything he does, shocks her, or at least frightens her. For himself, he cannot help finding her silly, and shrugging his shoulders at all the fanciful prejudices she shows, and all the little practices of which she has formed a habit. Love reconciles everything till the last quarter of the honey-moon; but afterwards? Every Sunday morning, every Friday at meal time, every day, on the subject of a procession, of a sermon, of a book, of a robe, more or less raised; in relation to everything, in relation to nothing, they exclaim with acrimony that they have not been suitably educated for each other.

The more the young girl has profited by her education, the more difficult will it be to establish a durable peace. Even her virtues at length will become causes of aversion, and the husband who esteems her, who loves her dearly, who cannot help respecting and cherishing her as the mother of his children, will go to seek elsewhere virtues less celestial, and prejudices less aggravating.

See how women, the best born, the most gifted, the most highly endowed, themselves often contribute very innocently to the destruction of the family. Fathers will some day comprehend that the young lady, being neither more depraved nor more foolish than her future husband, should learn the same truths, pursue the same objects, and found her virtues upon the same reason. To give the fair sex a good, solid, rational education, would result in doubling the army of Progress, in strengthening the ties of home, and in destroying that society outside of the marriage relation, the half-world (demi-monde) of the younger Dumas, which increases terribly.

Whose fault is it? A boy without fortune finds an employment, an occupation useful to others and to himself; he supports himself; often he accumulates a capital. A girl without money has only one resource, one industry, one possible business. Hence, this prostitution which overwhelms us. "It is unavoidable!" say the philosophers of the police. "We have even organized something normal and semi-official in the interest of Morals. The administrative and regulated debauchery which we cherish beneath our wings is a safety-valve. The excess of the passions of the people thus makes its escape. Without this precaution maidens of good family would not be safe in the street." Is it still worth while to refute this old, cynical paradox? It is one of those common forms of falsehood which every one repeats and nobody believes. Do you not know, good people, that all the vices are brothers? that in corrupt societies rape is not in inverse ratio, but in direct ratio to prostitution? That both have their source in the brutality of the passions, the impatience for enjoyment, and the relaxation of the moral bond? that politeness, courtesy, respect for a young defenceless girl, fly for shelter to the honest and patriarchal little towns, whose pavements have never been sullied by prostitution? No! it is not in the interest of good morals that the police resign themselves to tolerate the wicked. It is because prostitution is a necessary fruit of the social tree as it is planted, with its top downward, and its roots in the air. It is because half a million girls without fortune, without husband, without moral education, without talent, or without openings for the exercise of their talent, have no

other available capital than their bodies, and if you would prevent them from selling themselves, you must either feed them or kill them.

I am assured beyond doubt that the population of our country has ceased to increase for some years past. This period of stoppage can only be explained by an epidemic. But we have had neither plague, nor cholera, nor famine; the epidemic is in our morals. With a few rare exceptions, every woman of pleasure dreads maternity as a bankruptcy of her person, a ruin of her business. Hence it follows that the increasing corruption of our morals in Paris and in our large cities, reduces the amount of population, or the effective army of Progress. There will never be too many men in the world; there will never be men enough. Every existence is a good in itself, since Being and Good are identical. Let us add that an individual can produce by his labor more than he consumes for the satisfaction of his wants, and consequently that each birth augments the living capital of society.,

Therefore it is necessary to counteract all the vices, all the prejudices, and even all the laws which tend to make population diminish. Emile Augier has summed up in a celebrated verse, "We can give ourselves the luxury of a boy," a prejudice of our middle class. The richest and most moral men of the present day think that they act like good citizens and good fathers when they limit the number of their posterity. They consider it a duty not to beget more children than they can enrich. If they simply conformed to nature, like the day laborer who follows his instinct, they would give more men to society, and men more useful; that is to say, more active. We will add that they would better insure the happiness of their children by pushing them forward on the road of fortune, than by furnishing them with the means of living without work.

The retrogressive law of the 8th of May 1816, which 1830 and 1848 have failed to abrogate, adds every year a surplus to the demi-monde, and contributes its part to the decrease of population. What is Marriage? A contract by which the man engages to protect his wife, and the woman promises to be faithful to her husband. If one of the two contracting parties violates plighted faith, it restores the liberty of the other; this is evidently true. A husband betrayed by his wife becomes as free as if he had never said "yes." He becomes a widower, and no power can forbid his forming another union. The wife, against whom the tribunals have pronounced a divorce, resumes her maiden name. She is excluded from marriage for ever after. She has proved herself incapable of fulfilling her engagements, and society does not permit her to go on and betray another man. The children, if there are any, remain with the party who was not to blame. The same law applies with equal rigor to the husband who has grossly maltreated his wife. Such is the dictate of common sense and of the legislature of 1792, and of the true Code Napoleon. Such is the case in England, Germany, Russia, Poland, Sweden, Greece, Turkey, and even Belgium. Why has France substituted for a law so just and decent the ridiculous “separation of person?" Why does a woman convicted of adultery drag into the gutters the honorable name of her husband? Why is the betrayed

husband, if he wish to supply his children with a second mother, compelled to take a mistress? Why does she, who is no longer his wife, retain, three hundred miles away, the singular privilege of presenting him with heirs!

Why? Because the legislature of 1816 thought they saw a contradiction between the Code Napoleon and a text of the Evangelist. This text (xix Matthew) is subject to controversy; to such constructions that all protestants and many catholics interpret it less narrowly than we. But if it were

of the most dazzling perspicuity, it would constitute only an article of faith ; it should exert no action upon a practical and modern code of laws.

Laws are the expression of the public reason at a given moment of history; it is in their very essence to be subject to perpetual amelioration, in proportion as Humanity progresses and the idea of the good becomes more clear.

PLUTARCH.

CAN we marvel at Plutarch's fair fame, still so charming and so refreshing, or over-estimate the surpassing merits of his writings? It seems as I read as if none before, none since, had written lives, as if he alone were entitled to the name of biographer, such intimacy of insight in his laying open the springs of character, and through his parables portraying his times as no historian had done before: not Plato even, in the more living way of dialogue with his friends. Then his morals are a statement of the virtues to all times. And I read the list of his lost writings, not without a sense of personal wrong done to me, with emotion akin to what the merchant might feel in perusing the bill of freight after the loss of his vessel. Hercules, Hesiod, Pindar, Leonidas, Scipio, Augustus, Claudius, Epaminondas, minds of mark, all these and other precious pieces gone to the bottom his Books on the Academy of Plato, and the Philosophers and many more of this imperial freight, to be read by none now. Still there remains so much to be grateful for; so many names surviving to perpetuate virtue and all that is splendid in fame, by his own. I, for one, am his debtor, not for noble examples alone, but for the portraits of the possibilities of virtue, and all that is dearest to friendship, in his attractive pages. It is good exercise, good medicine, the reading of his books, good for to-day, as in times it was preceding ours, salutary reading for all times.

A. BRONSON ALCOTT.

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NOTES.

THE OLD PROTEST CONTINUED.

NEW PROTESTATION has arisen to answer the question,
How long shall we distrust our own methods?

If we believe in freedom, our method will correspond.

How to propagate good, by despotism, is well understood, and the world is full of missionaries.

How to propagate good by freedom, nobody seems to know. Scarce a missionary that can keep the faith.

Protestation should be a living protest against interference. Let the mind have its range. It will come home laden with treasures, and replenish the old homestead with immortality.

There are signals that denote the revival of such decision and earnestness as initiated the Reformation.

We say the Reformation, but Reformation is an old story. It began with the world.

When man appeared, he said, I can improve on this.

He began his experiment upon his neighbor, and got into trouble..

His neighbor turned Protestant.

Every generation is plunged anew into the old controversy. Every individual must take it up.

In spite of ourselves, with all deference to the missionary zeal, nor so rife among liberals, which would turn catholic and build, we are reminded that the conditions of growth are as yet mainly protestant.

From the beginning life is in bondage, struggling for emancipation from external powers. The struggle is the condition. of continuance and growth. Where the struggle ends, life ends.

Everybody who has risen in the world likes to remember the humble origin. It is something to be proud of. See what a distance I have placed between what I was, and what I am!

Who believes that if creation had been arrested when the Gorilla's organism was accomplished, the achievement would have been as complete a triumph as it is with the symmetry

and proportion of the human form? Gorillas asleep in their nests in the overgrown forests. The earth running to waste.

The Gorilla has now in good measure given up the contest, but doubtless the first young man that appeared was flayed alive.

But God could not think of resting with no more companionable an offspring than Barnum's last great wonder with its unillumined eye and sluggish heart. He would choose the keeper of the beast rather though on the understanding or promise

of great improvement.

God must either produce beings who could endlessly reproduce themselves as higher intelligences, or prepare the way for a new species.

No one can imagine such a programme for the Creator as this: God made the round ball we call earth, then thought he would cover it with grass and flowers; afterwards he bethought himself and made animals of different sizes and fashion, from a whim to see what odd and strange things he could do, and finally made man from a bright after-thought. On the contrary then, we say: The globe is nothing but man.

Its whole

history is inexplicable without the human Ideal animating it, from its first twirl in space. Its vitality is the human spirit. God disappearing to come forth as man. God lost, as it were, till found again in man's success.

Animate creation with the idea of man as it purport and destiny, and it is no stretch of the imagination to trace his pedigree to the first faint formations making their gestures of self-conscious life. Then Spirit began with feeble pulsation its career for liberty.

It was Protestant from that day forth.

Nothing could prevent the advent of man, for in all things below him his Spirit was striving, an unsatisfied Garibaldi, declaring for "Reason or Death."

But the liberated body was only a new beginning. How keep it? How, rather, get possession of it? Now it keeps him, owns him. It is Mother-Church to him, Catholic, shuts out the light, prohibits reason, cultivates the senses, sells indulgences, and finds him a willing customer.

Desire is not satisfied. Something beyond. Something more.