We may bring ourselves to understand, to some extent, how this system acts on Orientals by picturing to our thought how it would act on ourselves. Take the first fifty men you meet in the Strand, or see coming out of a Church. Look into their faces, and endeavour to make our what you can about them from their appearance. They are evidently most of them married men. This means with us that their bark of life, as respects one most important matter at all events, is now moored in harbour. Hope and fortune are words that, in this matter, have no longer any meaning for them. They have accepted the situation, and have ceased to think about houris. Each has taken his wife for better, for worse; for sickness and for health, till death shall part them. Their thoughts are now about their business, their families, their pursuits, their society. But what a change would come over the spirit of their dreams, if each could have as many houris as he pleased, and could afford, of one kind or another, houris ever fair and ever young; and could dismiss at any moment any he wished, for any reason, to be rid of, by the simple form of a writing of divorcement: no more trouble in it than in making an entry in one’s pocket-book, and as exclusively one’s own affair; and could dismiss some without even this small formality of the writing of divorcement. Under such circumstances the houri question, which now has no place in the thoughts of one of these worthy members of society, would straightway occupy in the minds of many of them the first place of all. It would then become necessary that a complete end should be put to many things that no harm comes from now. These staid and respectable gentlemen would soon find that houris must be excluded from Churches, as Orientals have found that they must be from Mosks, during the time of Divine Service, because, under the new system, it would be impossible for them to be devout when surrounded with houris. Neither could houris be any longer domestic servants in our fashion. Houris also must be excluded from society. Nor would it be admissible for houris to appear in public, or anywhere, except in the presence of their lords, with unveiled faces. A little exercise of the imagination enables us to see what the metamorphosis would be in ourselves. And on the Oriental the effects of the system are even greater, because he has no political life, less pre-occupation from business than we have, and none of those pursuits, and employments for the mind, which our education, and the state of knowledge amongst us give rise to here.