Reader! if you belong to the class of prudes or of libertines, I pray you, follow my argument no farther. Stop here, and believe that my heresies will not suit you. As a prude, you would find them too honest; as a libertine, too temperate. In the former case, you might call me a very shocking person; in the latter, a quiz or a bore. But if you be honest, upright, pure-minded—if you be unconscious of unworthy motive or selfish passion—if truth be your ambition, and the welfare of our race your object—then approach with me a subject the most important to man’s well-being; and approach it as I do, in a spirit of dispassionate, disinterested free enquiry. Approach it, resolving to prove all things, and hold fast that which is good. The discussion is one to which it is every man’s and every woman’s _duty_, (and ought to be every one’s _business_,) to attend. The welfare of the present generation, and—yet far more—of the next, requires it. Common sense sanctions it. And the national motto of my former country, “Honi soit qui mal y pense,”[6] may explain the spirit in which it is undertaken, and in which it ought to be received. Reader! it ought to concern you nothing who or what I am, who now addresses you. Truth is truth, if it fall from Satan’s lips; and error ought to be rejected, though preached by an angel from heaven. Even as an anonymous work, therefore, this treatise ought to obtain a full and candid examination from you. But, that you may not imagine I am ashamed of honestly discussing a subject so useful and important, I have given you my name on the title page. Neither is it any concern of yours what my character is, or has been. No man of sense or modesty unnecessarily obtrudes personalities that regard himself on the public. And, most assuredly, it is neither to gratify your curiosity or my vanity, if I now do violence to my feelings, and speak a few words touching myself. I do so, to disarm, if I can, prejudice of her sting; and thus to obtain the ears, even of the prejudiced; and also to acquaint my readers, that they are conversing on such a subject as this, with one, whom circumstance and education have happily preserved from habits of excess and associations of profligacy.