Every reflecting mind will distinguish between the unreasoning—sometimes even generous, imprudence of youthful passion, and the calculating selfishness of the matured and heartless libertine. It is a melancholy truth, that pseudo-civilization produces thousands of seducers by profession, who, while daily calling the heavens to witness their eternal affections, have no affection for anything on earth but their own precious and profligate selves. It is to characters so utterly worthless as these that my observations apply. Footnote 34: Jesus said unto her, “Neither do I condemn thee.” _John_ viii., 11. Footnote 35: I should like to hear these gentlemen explain, according to what principle they imagine the chastity of their _wives_ to grow out of a fear of offspring; so that, if released from such fear, prostitution would follow. I can readily comprehend that the unmarried may be supposed carefully to avoid that situation to which no legal cause can be assigned; but a wife must be especially dull, if she cannot assign, in all cases, a legal cause; and a husband must be especially sagacious, if he can tell whether the true cause be assigned or not. This safeguard to married chastity, therefore, to which the gentlemen of the Committee alluded to seem to look with so implicit a confidence, is a mere broken reed; and has been so ever since the days of Bethsheba. Yet _conjugal_ chastity is that which is especially valued. The inconstancy of a wife commonly cuts much deeper than the dishonour of a sister. In that case, then, which the world usually considers of the highest importance, the fear of offspring _imposes no check whatever_. It cannot make one iota of difference whether a married woman be knowing in physiology or not; except perhaps, indeed, to the husband’s advantage; in cases where the wife’s conscience induces her at least to guard against the possibility of burthening her legal lord with the care and support of children that are not his. Constancy, where it actually exists, is the offspring of something more efficacious than ignorance. And if in the wife’s case, men must and do trust to something else, why not in all other cases, where restraint may be considered desirable? Shall men trust in the greater, and fear to trust in the less? Whatever any one may choose to assert regarding his relatives’ secret inclinations to profligacy, these arguments may convince him that if he has any safeguard at present, a perusal of these pages will not destroy it. ’Tis strange that men, by way of suborning an argument, should be willing thus to vilify their relatives’ character and motives, without first carefully examining whether anything was gained to their cause, after all, by the vilification. Footnote 36: