not happiness the object which all societies should set
before them? Is it not this axiom that makes these wretched kings give
themselves so much trouble about their people? Well, the honest woman
has not, like them, thrones, gendarmes and tribunals; she has only a
bed to offer; but if our four hundred thousand women can, by this
ingenious machine, make a million celibates happy, do not they attain
in a mysterious manner, and without making any fuss, the end aimed at
by a government, namely, the end of giving the largest possible amount
of happiness to the mass of mankind?

"Yes, but the annoyances, the children, the troubles--"

Ah, you must permit me to proffer the consolatory thought with which
one of our wittiest caricaturists closes his satiric observations:
"Man is not perfect!" It is sufficient, therefore, that our
institutions have no more disadvantages than advantages in order to be
reckoned excellent; for the human race is not placed, socially
speaking, between the good and the bad, but between the bad and the
worse. Now if the work, which we are at present on the point of
concluding, has had for its object the diminution of the worse, as it
is found in matrimonial institutions, in laying bare the errors and
absurdities due to our manners and our prejudices, we shall certainly
have won one of the fairest titles that can be put forth by a man to a
place among the benefactors of humanity. Has not the author made it
his aim, by advising husbands, to make women more self-restrained and
consequently to impart more violence to passions, more money to the
treasury, more life to commerce and agriculture? Thanks to this last
Meditation he can flatter himself that he has strictly kept the vow of
eclecticism, which he made in projecting the work, and he hopes he has
marshaled all details of the case, and yet like an attorney-general
refrained from expressing his personal opinion. And really what do you
want with an axiom in the present matter? Do you wish that this book
should be a mere development of the last opinion held by Tronchet, who
in his closing days thought that the law of marriage had been drawn up
less in the interest of husbands than of children? I also wish it very
much. Would you rather desire that this book should serve as proof to
the peroration of the Capuchin, who preached before Anne of Austria,
and when he saw the queen and her ladies overwhelmed by his triumphant
arguments against their frailty, sa