as to prevent the fulness of her bosom and the roundness of her thighs being seen. And so it is that, since Adam’s fall, we see mankind hungry and incontinent. Why do they, when assembled in towns, impose on themselves privations of all kinds, and submit to a rule of life contrary to their own corrupted nature? It is said that they find it advantageous, and that they feel that their individual security depends on such restriction. But that would be to suppose them to have too much reasoning power, and, what’s more, a false reasoning, because it is absurd to save one’s life at the expense of all that makes it reasonable and valuable. It is further said that fear keeps them obedient, and it is true that prison, gallows and wheels are excellent assurers of submission to existing laws. But it is also certain that prejudice conspires with the laws, and it is not easy to see how compulsion could have been universally established. Laws are said to be the necessary conformity of things; but we have become aware that that conformity is contradictory to nature, and far from being necessary. Therefore, gentlemen, I’ll look for the source and origin of the laws not in man, but outside man, and I should think that, being strangers to mankind, they derive from God, who not only formed with His own mysterious hands earth and water, plants and animals, but the people also, and human society. I’m inclined to believe that the laws come direct from Him, from His first decalogue, and that they are inhuman because they are divine. It must be well understood that I here consider the codes in their principles and in their essence, without taking note of their ridiculous diversities and their pitiable complications. The details of customs and prescriptions, the written as well as the oral, are man’s work, and to be despised. But do not let us be afraid to recognise that the town is a divine institution. As a result, every government ought to be theocratic. One priest, famous for the part he took in the declaration of 1682, M. Bossuet, was not in error, when he wanted to form the rules of polity after the maxims of the Scriptures; and if he has pitiably failed in this endeavour, you have to accuse the weakness of his genius alone, which was too narrowly attached to examples taken from the books of Judges and Kings, without seeing that God, when He works on this world, proportions Himself to time and space, and knows the difference between Frenchmen and Israelites. The city established under His true and sole legitimate authority will not be the town of Joshua, Saul and David; it will rather be the town of the gospels, the town of the poor, where working-man and prostitute will not be humiliated by the Pharisee. Oh, sirs, how excellent it would be to extract from the Scriptures a polity more beautiful and more saintly than that which was extracted therefrom by that rocky and sterile M. Bossuet! What a city, more harmonious than that erected by the sounds