** "Boyer's resolution in this matter is the more remarkable, as he has been urged and pestered to submit to the forms of marriage. Grégoire, archbishop of Blois, and who is well known for the perseverance and benevolence with which he has, for a long series of years, advocated the cause of the African race, wrote to the president of Hayti in the most urgent terms, pressing upon him the virtue--the necessity, for his salvation--of conforming to the sacrament of marriage. To such a degree did the good old archbishop carry his intermeddling officiousness, that when Boyer mildly but firmly declined availing himself of his grace's advice, a rupture was the consequence, greatly to the sorrow of the president, who had ever entertained the greatest respect and affection for his ecclesiastical friend." "I imagine I hear from the clerical supporters of orthodoxy one general burst of indignation at this sample of national profligacy; at this contemning of the laws of God and man; at this escape from the Church's ceremonies and the ecclesiastical blessing. I imagine I hear the question sneeringly put, how long these same _respectable_ connections commonly last, and how many dozen times they are changed in the course of a year. "Gently, my reverend friends! it is natural you should find it wrong that men and women dispense with your services and curtail your fees in this matter. But it is neither just nor proper, that because no prayers are said, and no fees paid, you should denounce the custom as a profligate one. Learn (as I did the other day from an intelligent French gentleman who had remained some time on the island)--learn, that _although there are ten times as many placed as married, yet there are actually fewer separations among the former than divorces among the latter_. If constancy, then, is to be the criterion of morality, these same profligate unions--that is, unions unprayed-for by the priest and unpaid for to him--are ten times as moral as the religion-sanctioned institution of marriage.