Our social arrangements, therefore, by going against nature, in the physical, intellectual, and moral consequences she attaches to crime, offers to the vicious man the advantages of a robber who, sure of impunity, should see patrols watching over his safe-keeping, and racking their brains to perfect the instruments he wants for his midnight burglaries. Moreover, they have taken away every security from the victims of the wrong, in order to extend them to its promoters. Hence results the extent of the canker which is gnawing us; we have to endure even vanity of vices become fashionable, against which nothing can defend us, whilst we ought to be armed against the unpunished evil-doer. Prostitution, apart from marriage, has brought contagion to marriage itself. Take away from it the mercenary character of the contract, and none of these men will clog themselves with a permanent tie. Meanwhile, as they have one foot in respectable and the other in doubtful society, they have established the link of connection between the two hemispheres, and exact that their wives should adopt the courtesan’s manners, or make the courtesan adopt them by the imitation of theirs. But still the progress is not fully realised; for, if the so-called respectable man must obtain his civilian education in the haunts of profligacy, these haunts cannot be any longer closed to our modest girls, and we ought to think it as moral to admit into respectable society the daughters, sisters, wives and mothers, who go to the public thoroughfare to get lovers, as the sons, brothers, husbands and fathers who go there to get fresh mistresses. If we shudder at these logical consequences, they may, at least, teach us where we are in respect to them from the stand-point of law, natural morality and justice, for conjugal union is only possible where there exists, in those united, conformity of education and morals. Society, like the family, finds itself afflicted by this profligacy, which, in relation to marriage, further destroys the proportionate balance of the births of each sex. It takes for granted a hundred, and even a thousand times, more male than female debauchees, and corresponds to an equal number of modest girls who are living in discomfort or poverty, since wherever a hundred men can run after one woman for the purpose of prostitution, it follows that a hundred women ought to run after one man for the purpose of marrying him. When the evil has reached these proportions, the fall of the arts and literature follows the corruption of morals. This is the cause of those debased talents, those obscenities which bring discredit upon art, and which, instead of the severely chaste creations of the Poussins and the Lesueurs, present for our contemplation the orgies of artistes falling, when overcome by drunkenness, into the courtesan’s arms; the impurities displayed in our monuments, in our public squares, is the result of a like cause.