It is, nevertheless, to Art. 340 of our Civil Code that the guilty complaisance of our interpretation of the law for profligate morals must be attributed. The license into which the irresponsibility there laid down hurries a great number of law students, greatly contributes to warp their judgment in these suits, and to take from vice its last restraint. Alas! shall we have the energy necessary for a real reform? We have astonishingly perfected the physical sciences, and developed material civilization; but we have so little advanced in the science of the law and the duty which govern our connexions in society, our ambition is so little excited for the development of human dignity, that we put our frightful complaisance for debauchery under the patronage of St. Augustine and St. Louis. Should we be willing to retrograde to such an extent in the arts and mechanical processes—we who, in morals, dare to take our ideal in pagan and barbarian society? When our Senate, some years ago, discussed this grave question, it did not put the inquiry to itself, whether seduction and irresponsible debauchery are the great highways of public infamy; still less did it examine if despotic centralization, which arbitrarily deprives the young girl of professional instruction, and the woman of an honourable income, does not at all contribute to her ruin. This Senate, _the guardian of morals_, refrained from looking round within its own precincts, to see if it were not, in any way, harbouring members whose example might weaken the authority of its precepts; it did not seem to suspect that a courtesan is the effect of a debauchee who pays for her, and it did not at all wish to know if its sons were contributing to the evil: laying it wholly upon the _luxuriousness of women_, it contented itself with some pleasantries, and, far from opposing strong means of resistance to profligacy, declared that Art. 484 of our Criminal Code sufficed for putting down vice.[53] Almost immediately after this discussion, the Asiatic pest, raging around us, threatened our physical existence. Oh! then we became the champions of progress; we knew how to attack the evil in its very source; our civilizing efforts were proposing to purify the Ganges itself—the home of the epidemic: ordering inquiries, putting sixteen questions to the meeting of the international conference at Constantinople, we made an appeal to the enlightened intelligence of the whole world. Why then does our energy fail in view of the plague of public profligacy, more fatal to the moral life of a nation than is the cholera-epidemic to its material life? Since we know the causes of the evil, we deserve to be execrated if we do not look for wholesome means of reaction—if authorities established to put it down continue to protect it. The measures I am proposing, if they are examined by the prismatic glass of history, reason, national and personal rights, are the conditions of liberty and public decency.