We must recognize examples of the second kind of error in the discussions constantly held as to social or political institutions, when instead of combating them as irrational, or of defending them as rational in historical circumstances, they are defended and combated because they differ from or conform to the true idea of right or to the true idea of those particular institutions, recourse being thus had to abstract reasons, as has very well been said. A reformer will maintain the recognition of the right of women to the administrative or political vote, because women also form part of the State and have general and particular interests, which they wish to guarantee directly, without the inter-position of men, whose interests are sometimes at variance with theirs: an argument that a conservative will deny altogether, making appeal to the function of woman, enclosed by eternal law in the circle of the family. A reformer will propose divorce as the natural complement to matrimony, because, where spiritual agreement ends, there too should end every other tie, whereas a conservative will oppose the argument as contradictory to the very essence of matrimony, comparing such a proposal with concubinage, or with what is called free love. And so on.--When such arguments are heard, it is remarked that natural rights are not dead. But the question as to the political vote for women may be serious or ridiculous, according to place and time; as divorce is loftily moral or profoundly immoral, according to time and place, and it is only mental narrowness or ignorance that can place outside humanity, or believe to be living or persisting in immorality, peoples that practise divorce or indissoluble matrimony, or those of to-day, who refuse the vote to women or those of the future who will recognize their right to it, if they do recognize it. But even polygamy or free love is not immoral, irrational and unnatural, once it has been an institution considered legitimate in certain times and places; nor even, we insist upon saying it (however repugnant to our hearts and to our stomachs of civilized Europeans), anthropophagy, for even among the anthropophagi were men (we hope it will be admitted), who felt themselves to be most virtuous in their clearest consciousness of self, and who nevertheless ate their like with the same tranquillity that we eat a roast chicken, without hatred of the chicken, but being quite well aware, for the moment at any rate, that we are not able to do otherwise. The unconscious reasoners on the basis of natural law must have forgotten that page of Cornelius Νepos, which, however, they must certainly have translated in their first years at the gymnasium: _Expertes literarum Graecarum nihil rectum nisi quod ipsorum moribus conveniat putabunt. Hi, si didicerint non eadem omnibus esse honesta atque turpia, SED OMNIA MAJORUM INSTITUTIS JUDICARI, non admirabuntur nos in Graiorum virtutibus exponendis mores eorum secutos.