honor or in the
interest of marriageable people, or for the advantage of morality and
the progress of human institutions, to investigate the number of honest
wives. What! the French government, if inquiry is made of it, is able to
say how many men it has under arms, how many spies, how many employees,
how many scholars; but, when it is asked how many virtuous women, it can
answer nothing! If the King of France took into his head to choose his
august partner from among his subjects, the administration could not
even tell him the number of white lambs from whom he could make his
choice. It would be obliged to resort to some competition which awards
the rose of good conduct, and that would be a laughable event.

Were the ancients then our masters in political institutions as in
morality? History teaches us that Ahasuerus, when he wished to take a
wife from among the damsels of Persia, chose Esther, the most virtuous
and the most beautiful. His ministers therefore must necessarily
have discovered some method of obtaining the cream of the population.
Unfortunately the Bible, which is so clear on all matrimonial questions,
has omitted to give us a rule for matrimonial choice.

Let us try to supply this gap in the work of the administration by
calculating the sum of the female sex in France. Here we call the
attention of all friends to public morality, and we appoint them judges
of our method of procedure. We shall attempt to be particularly liberal
in our estimations, particularly exact in our reasoning, in order that
every one may accept the result of this analysis.

The inhabitants of France are generally reckoned at thirty millions.

Certain naturalists think that the number of women exceeds that of men;
but as many statisticians are of the opposite opinion, we will make the
most probable calculation by allowing fifteen millions for the women.

We will begin by cutting down this sum by nine millions, which stands
for those who seem to have some resemblance to women, but whom we are
compelled to reject upon serious considerations.

Let us explain:

Naturalists consider man to be no more than a unique species of the
order bimana, established by Dumeril in his _Analytic Zoology_, page
16; and Bory de Saint Vincent thinks that the ourang-outang ought to be
included in the same order if we would make the species complete.

If these zoologists see in us nothing more than a mammal with thirty-two
vertebrae possessing the