to be paid to-morrow [tradesmen should always be
visited at the end of the month] come to her at noon; her husband will
be in the chamber. Do not attend to any sign which she may make to
impose silence upon you--speak out boldly. I will pay all."

So that the catastrophe in the science of marriage is what figures are
in arithmetic.

All the principles of higher conjugal philosophy, on which are based the
means of defence outlined in this second part of our book, are derived
from the nature of human sentiments, and we have found them in different
places in the great book of the world. Just as persons of intellect
instinctively apply the laws of taste whose principles they would find
difficulty in formulating, so we have seen numberless people of deep
feeling employing with singular felicity the precepts which we are about
to unfold, yet none of them consciously acted on a definite system.
The sentiments which this situation inspired only revealed to them
incomplete fragments of a vast system; just as the scientific men of the
sixteenth century found that their imperfect microscopes did not enable
them to see all the living organisms, whose existence had yet been
proved to them by the logic of their patient genius.

We hope that the observations already made in this book, and in those
which follow, will be of a nature to destroy the opinion which frivolous
men maintain, namely that marriage is a sinecure. According to our view,
a husband who gives way to ennui is a heretic, and more than that, he is
a man who lives quite out of sympathy with the marriage state, of whose
importance he has no conception. In this connection, these Meditations
perhaps will reveal to very many ignorant men the mysteries of a world
before which they stand with open eyes, yet without seeing it.

We hope, moreover, that these principles when well applied will produce
many conversions, and that among the pages that separate this second
part from that entitled _Civil War_ many tears will be shed and many
vows of repentance breathed.

Yes, among the four hundred thousand honest women whom we have so
carefully sifted out from all the European nations, we indulge the
belief that there are a certain number, say three hundred thousand, who
will be sufficiently self-willed, charming, adorable, and bellicose to
raise the standard of _Civil War_.

To arms then, to arms!

THIRD PART. RELATING TO CIVIL WAR.

"Lovely as th