The distinction is one which is not quite disregarded even by men of those races which have most respect for law. Nobody feels that the injunction to keep off the grass in a public park, or the rule to pass to the right in driving, is of quite the same sort of obligation as the precept to keep your hands from picking and stealing. A far greater amount of odium is incurred by the known breach of a rule of natural morals, than by that of a rule depending solely on the ordinance of the legislative power. Smuggling may be mentioned as a crime coming near the dividing line in the popular feeling of most countries. Few men would feel as much disgraced at being caught by a custom-house officer, with a box of cigars hidden under the trowsers at the bottom of their trunk, as at being seized in the act of stealing the same box from the counter of a tobacconist. In countries where the laws are arbitrary and the law-making power distrusted, this distinction is more strongly marked than where the government has the full confidence and approbation of the community. The more progressive Frenchmen of a hundred and fifty years ago believed the laws of their country to be bad in many respects. They therefore thought that there was a great difference between what jurists call _prohibited wrong_ and _wrong in itself_. Now, admitting this distinction to exist in men's minds, there is one large class of crimes and vices which is put in one category by most Anglo-Saxons and which was put in the other by the French Philosophers. These are the breaches of the sexual laws. It is one of the greatest services of the church to Christendom that she has always laid particular emphasis on the duty of chastity. It is one of her greatest errors, that she has exalted the practice of celibacy over that of conjugal fidelity. The Philosophers, as was their custom, looked abroad on the practice of various nations. They found that some of the ancients granted divorce freely at the request of either party. They learned that Orientals generally allowed polygamy. They saw in their own country a low state of sexual morals among the highest classes, partly due perhaps to the example of a depraved court. Observation and desire concurred with hatred of the clergy to warp their judgments. They forgot, at least in part, that chastity is the foundation of the family and the civilized state; that divorce and polygamy, although of momentous importance, are but secondary questions; that on sexual self-restraint civilization rests, as much as on respect for life and property. On the false theory that unchastity is but an artificial crime, the delusive invention of an ascetic church, will, I think, be found to depend much that has been worst in the practice of Frenchmen, much that is most disgusting in their literature.[Footnote: The commandment "Thou shalt not commit adultery" is equally applicable to polygamists and monogamists. It was