Where parents were living--although even then it was thought scarcely necessary to consult a young woman upon the disposal of her own hand,--yet we may suppose that parental affection might occasionally enable her to exercise some influence, however small, in the acceptance or rejection of a lover. But where the parents were dead, she had for many centuries, especially in France, no voice whatever in the matter, and was consigned, often against her inclination, to the arms of one whom perhaps she had never seen, whom she often regarded with indifference, and often with hate. It is little to be wondered at that such a state of things produced gross immorality. The first act of a young woman's life, the act alone by which she obtained comparative freedom, being one by which all the fine and delicate sensibilities, planted by God in the female heart, were violated at once,--it is little to be wondered at, I say, that the vows by which men endeavoured to supply the place of principles, should be violated likewise at the voice of inclination. The fault, however, was in the feudal system; and the manner in which lands were first acquired in Europe, produced regulations for their transmission which generated the greatest social evils,--from the consequences of which indeed we are not yet altogether free. Each feoff was required to be held by a man who could do service to his sovereign in the field; and, consequently, when any vassal or vavasor died, leaving behind him one or more daughters, the law required that the feoff should be managed by a guardian till such time as, by marriage, the heiress or heiresses could present men to do homage for their lands, and perform military service to the superior lord. Thus, an heiress could not marry without her lord's approbation; and by the constitutions of St. Louis it was enacted, that, even where a daughter was left under the care of her mother, the lord might require security that she should not form an alliance without his consent; and the good king, in the rule which he lays down for the choice of a husband for a ward, directs the guardian simply, if there be two or three who offer, to take the richest. As the feudal system declined in France, however, the power of the lord over his vassals of course diminished, and long before the end of the sixteenth century it was but little exercised by one nobleman over another. In cases where large inheritances fell to daughters, their marriages were made up in their own families; and though they themselves had, in general, as little choice allowed them as ever, yet their own relations were the persons who selected the future companions of their life. Thus fathers, brothers, cousins, uncles, aunts, had all far more to do with the marriage than the person whose weal or woe was to be affected by it.