n who, finding
himself in a path of dereliction, arrests himself in his downward
career, and, by a wonderful effort of self-restraint, stops dead
short, and will suffer no inducement, no seduction, to lead him one
step further; or he, who, floating down the stream of his own vicious
passions, takes the flood-tide of iniquity, and, indifferent to every
consequence, deaf to all remonstrance, seeks but the indulgence of his
own egotistical pleasure with a stern determination to pursue it to
the last? Of course you will say, that he who repents is better than
he who persists; there is hope for the one, there is none for the
other. Yet would you believe it, our common law asserts directly the
reverse, pronouncing the culpability of the former as meriting heavy
punishment, while the latter is not assailable even by implication.

That I may make myself more clear, I shall give an instance of my
meaning. Scarcely a week passes over without a trial for breach of
promise of marriage. Sometimes the gay Lothario, to use the phrase of
the newspapers, is nineteen, sometimes ninety. In either case his
conduct is a frightful tissue of perjured vows and base deception. His
innumerable letters breathing all the tenderness of affectionate
solicitude, intended but for the eyes of her he loves, are read in
open court; attested copies are shown to the judge, or handed up to
the jury-box. The course of his true love is traced from the bubbling
fountain of first acquaintance to the broad river of his passionate
devotion. Its rapids and its whirlpools, its placid lakes, its frothy
torrents, its windings and its turnings, its ebbs and flows, are
discussed, detailed, and descanted on with all the hacknied precision
of the craft, as though his heart was a bill of exchange, or the
current of his affection a disputed mill-stream. And what, after all,
is this man's crime? knowing that love is the great humanizer of our
race, and feeling probably how much he stands in need of some
civilizing process, he attaches himself to some lovely and attractive
girl, who, in the reciprocity of her affection, is herself benefited
in a degree equal to him. If the soft solicitude of the tender
passion, if its ennobling self-respect, if its purifying influence on
the heart, be good for the man, how much more so is it for the woman.
If _he_ be taught to feel how the refined enjoyments of an attractive
girl's mind are superior to the base and degenerate pursuits of
ev