e compassion of the reader by
bringing before him ill-assorted or compulsory marriages. Although
habitual tolerance has long since relaxed our morals, an author could
hardly succeed in interesting us in the misfortunes of his characters,
if he did not first palliate their faults. This artifice seldom fails:
the daily scenes we witness prepare us long beforehand to be indulgent.
But American writers could never render these palliations probable to
their readers; their customs and laws are opposed to it; and as they
despair of rendering levity of conduct pleasing, they cease to depict
it. This is one of the causes to which must be attributed the small
number of novels published in the United States.]

The very circumstances which render matrimonial fidelity more obligatory
also render it more easy. In aristocratic countries the object of
marriage is rather to unite property than persons; hence the husband is
sometimes at school and the wife at nurse when they are betrothed. It
cannot be wondered at if the conjugal tie which holds the fortunes of
the pair united allows their hearts to rove; this is the natural result
of the nature of the contract. When, on the contrary, a man always
chooses a wife for himself, without any external coercion or even
guidance, it is generally a conformity of tastes and opinions which
brings a man and a woman together, and this same conformity keeps and
fixes them in close habits of intimacy.

Our forefathers had conceived a very strange notion on the subject of
marriage: as they had remarked that the small number of love-matches
which occurred in their time almost always turned out ill, they
resolutely inferred that it was exceedingly dangerous to listen to the
dictates of the heart on the subject. Accident appeared to them to be a
better guide than choice. Yet it was not very difficult to perceive that
the examples which they witnessed did in fact prove nothing at all. For
in the first place, if democratic nations leave a woman at liberty
to choose her husband, they take care to give her mind sufficient
knowledge, and her will sufficient strength, to make so important a
choice: whereas the young women who, amongst aristocratic nations,
furtively elope from the authority of their parents to throw themselves
of their own accord into the arms of men whom they have had neither time
to know, nor ability to judge of, are totally without those securities.
It is not surprising that they make a bad