In providing for the birth of nearly equal numbers of each sex, nature clearly establishes monogamy, or union of single pairs, as the condition of things most in accordance with natural laws. The family also, the first germ of civilisation, is impossible, or can only exist in a very imperfect and half-developed state, without this permanent union of a single husband and wife. Violations of this law lead to such disastrous consequences to individuals, and are so deteriorating to nations, that they are properly considered as the ‘immorality’ _par excellence_, and condemned by all right-minded opinion. And yet to observe this law is a constant lesson in self-control for a great part of the life: a lesson of the utmost value, for it is a virtue which is at the root of all other virtues. And it is formed and becomes habitual and easy by practice, for just as the muscles of the ballet-dancer’s leg or blacksmith’s arm acquire strength and elasticity by use, so do the finer fibres of the brain improve by exercise and become soft and flabby by disuse, so that effort in the former case is a pleasure and in the latter a pain. For this reason chaste nations are generally strong and conquering nations; dissolute Imperial Rome went down before the Goths and Germans, and polygamous Turkey perishes of dry rot in the midst of the progress of the nineteenth century. Indeed, there is no better test of the position which either an individual, a class, or a nation hold in the scale of civilisation, than the tone which prevails among the men with regard to women. Wherever Turkish ideas prevail, we may be sure that whatever may be the outward varnish of manner there is essential snobbishness. Up and down Along the scale of life, through all, To him who wears the golden ball, By birth a king, at heart a clown On the other hand, wherever women are regarded with a chivalrous respect and reverence, the heart of a true gentleman beats, though it be under the rough exterior of one of Bret Harte’s cow-boys or Californian miners. Nothing in fact gives one more hope in the progress of human society than to find that in the freest countries, and those farthest advanced towards modern ideas and democratic institutions, the tone with regard to women shows the greatest improvement. There is a regular _crescendo_ scale of progress from Turkey to America. I do not refer so much to the fact that in the newer colonies and countries women can travel unprotected without fear of insult or injury, as to the almost instinctive recognition of their equal rights as intelligent and moral beings who have a personality and character of their own, which places them on the same platform as men though on opposite sides of it.