And so it follows that, in this region, before men have attained to even the prime of life, their wives are getting old. A necessary consequence of this must be that polygamy will come to be as natural as marriage itself. It has, at all events, been so hitherto. The facilities for divorce which law and custom provide in these countries (all that is needed is a writing of divorcement) are a result of the same causes: they are, in fact, a corollary to the practice of polygamy. They enable both the man and the woman to escape from what, under the system of polygamy, must often become an insupportable situation, and have the practical effect of making marriage only a temporary arrangement. Indeed, sometimes even before the marriage contract is entered into, the law of divorcement is discounted in this way by the mutual agreement of both parties. That ‘age cannot wither her’ is, then, precisely the opposite of being a characteristic of the Arab, or even of the oriental, woman. Had it been otherwise with them, polygamy would never have been the practice over this large portion of the earth’s surface. In our cold, humid, dull climate opposite conditions have produced opposite effects. Here the woman arrives slowly at maturity; and, which is the great point, fights a good fight against the inroads of age. Man has no advantage over her in this respect. And when she is marriageable, she is, not a child of ten years of age, but a woman of twenty, with sufficient knowledge, and firmness of character to secure her own rights. The consequence, therefore, here is that men have felt no necessity for maintaining a plurality of wives; and if they had wished for it, the women would not have allowed them to have it. _Voilà tout._ Nature it is that has made us monogamists. No religion that has ever been accepted in Europe has legislated in favour of the opposite practice, because it was obvious, and all men were agreed on the point, that monogamy was most suitable to, and the best arrangement for, us. The exceptional existence of the Arabic custom in European Turkey is one of those exceptions which prove a rule.