mmandment, and to the facts and results
growing out of its violation. "This same class of reformers have
heretofore been accustomed to strike off prints of the most
unmentionable scenes of these houses of pollution in their naked forms,
and in the very acts of crime, for public display, that the public might
know what they are: in other words, as may be imagined, to make sport
for the initiated, to tempt the appetites and passions of the young, who
otherwise would have known little or nothing about it, into the same
vortex of ruin, and to cause the decent and virtuous to turn away with
emotions of ineffable regret."

I cannot help inquiring, how is it, if the Americans are, as they
assert, both orally and in their printed public documents, a _very moral
nation_, that they find it necessary to resort to all these societies
for the improvement of their brother citizens; and how is it that their
reports are full of such unexampled atrocities, as are printed and
circulated in evidence of the necessity of their stemming the current of
vice! The Americans were constantly twitting me about the occasional
cases of adultery and divorce which appear in our newspapers, assuring
me at the same time, that there was hardly ever such a thing heard of in
their own moral community. Now, it appears that this subject has not
only been taken up by the clergy, (for Dr Dwight, late president of
Yale College, preached a sermon on the seventh commandment, which an
American author asserts "was heard with pain and confusion of face, and
which never can be read in a promiscuous circle without exciting the
same feelings;") but by one of their societies also; and, although they
have not assumed the name of the _Patent Anti-Adultery Society_, they
are positively doing the work of such a one, and the details are entered
into in promiscuous assemblies without the least reservation.

The author before mentioned says:

"The common feeling on the subject has been declared false delicacy;
and, in order to break ground against its sway, females have been forced
into the van of this enterprise; and persuaded to act as agents, not
only among their own sex, but in circumstances where they must
necessarily agitate the subject with men,--not wives with husbands,
which would be bad enough, but _young and single women_ with _young and
single men_! And we have been credibly informed, that attempts have
been made to form associations among _wives_ to regulate