elinquish his slave. When the Roman
matrons became the equal and voluntary companions of their lords, a new
jurisprudence was introduced, that marriage, like other partnerships,
might be dissolved by the abdication of one of the associates. In three
centuries of prosperity and corruption, this principle was enlarged to
frequent practice and pernicious abuse.

Passion, interest, or caprice, suggested daily motives for the
dissolution of marriage; a word, a sign, a message, a letter, the
mandate of a freedman, declared the separation; the most tender of human
connections was degraded to a transient society of profit or pleasure.
According to the various conditions of life, both sexes alternately felt
the disgrace and injury: an inconstant spouse transferred her wealth to
a new family, abandoning a numerous, perhaps a spurious, progeny to
the paternal authority and care of her late husband; a beautiful virgin
might be dismissed to the world, old, indigent, and friendless; but
the reluctance of the Romans, when they were pressed to marriage by
Augustus, sufficiently marks, that the prevailing institutions were
least favorable to the males. A specious theory is confuted by this free
and perfect experiment, which demonstrates, that the liberty of divorce
does not contribute to happiness and virtue. The facility of separation
would destroy all mutual confidence, and inflame every trifling dispute:
the minute difference between a husband and a stranger, which might so
easily be removed, might still more easily be forgotten; and the matron,
who in five years can submit to the embraces of eight husbands, must
cease to reverence the chastity of her own person. [125]

[Footnote 123: According to Plutarch, (p. 57,) Romulus allowed only
three grounds of a divorce--drunkenness, adultery, and false keys.
Otherwise, the husband who abused his supremacy forfeited half his goods
to the wife, and half to the goddess Ceres, and offered a sacrifice
(with the remainder?) to the terrestrial deities. This strange law was
either imaginary or transient.]

[Footnote 1231: Montesquieu relates and explains this fact in a
different marnes Esprit des Loix, l. xvi. c. 16.--G.]

[Footnote 124: In the year of Rome 523, Spurius Carvilius Ruga
repudiated a fair, a good, but a barren, wife, (Dionysius Hal. l. ii.
p. 93. Plutarch, in Numa, p. 141; Valerius Maximus, l. ii. c. 1; Aulus
Gellius, iv. 3.) He was questioned by the censors, and hated by the
peo