And, fourthly. To seek peace and mental quiet through a divorce is, as a general thing, but cowardice. To encourage them is, therefore, to offer a premium for pusillanimity. Were marriages, or rather engagements, contracted less hastily, and never, as is sometimes confessed, from curiosity, coquetry, or for fun, much, very much evil and suffering would be prevented. Men and women are often but the silliest of children, playing with each other’s hearts as though they were toys, and sowing for themselves and for each other a harvest of life-long misery. I am writing no homily. I am stating what every man who reads this knows to be the fact, and there is not a single one of us, however happy his present relation, who has not some careless, or rude, or positively unkind word or act to regret, possibly to bitterly repent himself of. We may well excuse women for the witching, though sometimes galling, arts they practise on us, for it is but a part of their charm. Let us, however, never excuse ourselves for inflicting hurt upon them, or disaster. If carelessly done, it should be sincerely regretted. No gentleman could commit such an act with malice aforethought. Were these the rules of life generally followed, and were they all embodied in the single line, “To err is human, to forgive divine,” divorces would no more be thought of, and we should taste even in this world that best of refreshments, the sweet sleep of the just. FOOTNOTES: [39] The reader will find this subject fully discussed in a late publication upon Marriage in the United States by Mons. A. Carlier, of Paris, and Dr. B. J. Jeffries, of Boston. VIII.—A PLEA FOR WOMAN. In bringing this essay, which I hope has not wholly been a tedious one to my readers, to a close, I cannot do better than recapitulate my reasons for writing it, the main argument that I have advanced, and the end or effect I have labored to accomplish, the latter being to cure, as a physician, the great and festering sore on our body politic, corrupting its life-blood and threatening its very existence.