call the intermediate or transition
period, it was otherwise. Then there were many laws and precepts
established which are now all but obsolete,--for since, the occasion for
appealing to them scarcely arises. As an example, the love and practice
of truth are amongst the very first things inculcated in the child, and
are now everywhere and by all classes practised in Montalluyah. Laws,
then, which suppose the possibility of a deviation from truth are
scarcely ever appealed to--such as, for instance, the precept, "Ask not
your neighbour what you know he wishes to conceal, lest he lie," and the
accompanying law preventing one person from annoying another with
improper questions, and thus probably drawing forth untruths. These,
like the laws and precepts enjoining all to industry, and many others,
belong to a bygone age, and to another state of things, and were only
needed in the intermediate epoch, just as particular remedies were then
required to cure the diseases of those who, having been born before my
reign, had in their childhood and youth been weakened by disease, or had
received into their systems the germs of future intense suffering,
which, had the child been born later, would have been completely
eradicated in their incipiency. But as these maladies existed in the
intermediate epoch in their virulence, we were for a time obliged to
continue the principle formerly adopted,--that of expelling one poison
by administering another.

The fact that everything belonging to women is now known and adequately
recognised and rewarded makes them contented and happy. Under the system
existing before my reign this was not so,--the most beautiful were often
the most discontented; they were more easily acted upon by evil spirits,
who assumed the fairest and most seductive appearances to lure their
victims; they were often the most susceptible to flattery, and easiest
led astray; and when once drawn from the proper path, they were the most
cruelly persecuted by a class of inferior persons, who, had their own
secret conduct been known to man as it is to a superior order of beings,
would never have dared to throw even the smallest stone at their poor
persecuted sister, who had, as was often the case, been led astray by
the very excess of a virtue which defective education had left
unbalanced by its regulating qualities.

Although it was one of the best known precepts of our religion that the
fold should always be open to receive t