d by
uncleanliness; that they instituted and consecrated ceremonies of
ablutions baths, baptisms, and of purifications, even by fire and the
aromatic fumes of incense, myrrh, benjamin, etc., so that the entire
system of pollutions, all those rites of clean and unclean things,
degenerated since into abuses and prejudices, were only founded
originally on the judicious observation, which wise and learned men
had made, of the extreme influence that cleanliness in dress and abode
exercises over the health of the body, and by an immediate consequence
over that of the mind and moral faculties.

Thus all the individual virtues have for their object, more or less
direct, more or less near, the preservation of the man who practises
them and by the preservation of each man, they lead to that of families
and society, which are composed of the united sum of individuals.

CHAPTER X.

ON DOMESTIC VIRTUES.

Q. What do you mean be domestic virtues?

A. I mean the practice of actions useful to a family, supposed to live
in the same house.*

* Domestic is derived from the Latin word domus, a house.

Q. What are those virtues?

A. They are economy, paternal love, filial love, conjugal love,
fraternal love, and the accomplishment of the duties of master and
servant.

Q. What is economy?

A. It is, according to the most extensive meaning of the word, the
proper administration of every thing that concerns the existence of
the family or house; and as subsistence holds the first rank, the word
economy in confined to the employment of money for the wants of life.

Q. Why is economy a virtue?

A. Because a man who makes no useless expenses acquires a
superabundancy, which is true wealth, and by means of which he procures
for himself and his family everything that is really convenient and
useful; without mentioning his securing thereby resources against
accidental and unforeseen losses, so that he and his family enjoy
an agreeable and undisturbed competency, which is the basis of human
felicity.

Q. Dissipation and prodigality, therefore, are vices?

A. Yes, for by them man, in the end, is deprived of the necessaries
of life; he falls into poverty and wretchedness; and his very friends,
fearing to be obliged to restore to him what he has spent with or for
them, avoid him as a debtor does his creditor, and he remains abandoned
by the whole world.

Q. What is paternal love?

A. It is the assiduous care taken by pare