The revolution had seared the feelings and hardened the hearts of a light-minded people: this was the natural effect of its horrors and of the ruin which it had spread[10]. That immorality which a succession of vicious courts had encouraged by their example, was released by the revolution from all restraints of law and of external decorum. ♦FREQUENCY OF DIVORCES.♦ The religious sanction of marriage was destroyed, and the unbounded facility of divorce rendered the civil ceremony a mere form, which was no longer binding than till one of the parties might choose to throw off the engagement. ♦OBSCENE PUBLICATIONS.♦ The literature of France, always, to the disgrace of the nation, more licentious than that of any other country, became, under the perfect freedom of the press, obscene to a degree too loathsome for expression; the arts were prostituted to the same devilish purpose; and the line of distinction between vice and virtue, which can never be too strongly marked, was as completely effaced in general practice as in the theories of those sophists who have laboured to corrupt their fellow-creatures. Such things were beneath the consideration of a legislature which arrogated to itself the praise of philosophical liberality; or, rather, they accorded with the views of that foul philosophy, which, regarding man as a mere material machine, would degrade him to the condition of the beasts that perish. Gambling, also, which every government that regards the welfare of its subjects endeavours to check by salutary laws, was encouraged by authority in France. ♦GAMING-HOUSES ESTABLISHED BY GOVERNMENT.♦ Every week two or three lotteries were drawn, in which the poorest of the poor were tempted to engage, there being shares as low as sixpence. Nor must it be supposed that this measure was defended upon the specious ground that governments ought to regulate the vices which they cannot prevent, and therefore may allowably make them conducive to the advantage of the state. The French government legalized this vice in its fullest extent, took to itself a monopoly of the gaming-houses, farmed them at one time, and afterwards administered them by agents of its own. This profligate measure originated with the Directory, and was continued by Buonaparte: whatever tended to make men prodigal and desperate accorded with the spirit of his system, and under that system every thing tended to that effect. ♦ABOLITION OF PRIMOGENITURE.♦