onfidence
and reciprocal virtues, is the only counterbalancing consolation in
this scene of mischief and misery. But how rarely is this the case
according to the present system of marriage! So far from being a
central point of expansion to the great circle of universal
benevolence, it serves only to concentrate the feelings of natural
sympathy in the reflected selfishness of family interest, and to
substitute for the _humani nihil alienum puto_ of youthful
philanthropy, the _charity begins at home_ of maturer years. And what
accession of individual happiness is acquired by this oblivion of the
general good? Luxury, despotism, and avarice have so seized and
entangled nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand of the
human race, that the matrimonial compact, which ought to be the most
easy, the most free, and the most simple of all engagements, is become
the most slavish and complicated,--a mere question of finance,--a
system of bargain, and barter, and commerce, and trick, and chicanery,
and dissimulation, and fraud. Is there one instance in ten thousand,
in which the buds of first affection are not most cruelly and
hopelessly blasted, by avarice, or ambition, or arbitrary power?
Females, condemned during the whole flower of their youth to a worse
than monastic celibacy, irrevocably debarred from the hope to which
their first affections pointed, will, at a certain period of life, as
the natural delicacy of taste and feeling is gradually worn away by
the attrition of society, become willing to take up with any coxcomb
or scoundrel, whom that merciless and mercenary gang of cold-blooded
slaves and assassins, called, in the ordinary prostitution of language
_friends_, may agree in designating as a _prudent choice_. Young men,
on the other hand, are driven by the same vile superstitions from the
company of the most amiable and modest of the opposite sex, to that of
those miserable victims and outcasts of a world which dares to call
itself virtuous, whom that very society whose pernicious institutions
first caused their aberrations,--consigning them, without one tear of
pity or one struggle of remorse, to penury, infamy, and
disease,--condemns to bear the burden of its own atrocious
absurdities! Thus, the youth of one sex is consumed in slavery,
disappointment, and spleen; that of the other, in frantic folly and
selfish intemperance: till at length, on the necks of a couple so
enfeebled, so perverted, so distempered b