half of the species wholly out of the guardianship and protection of the other. The practice of divorce, though in some countries permitted, has been discouraged in all. In the East, polygamy and divorce are in discredit; and the manners correct the laws. In Rome, whilst Rome was in its integrity, the few causes allowed for divorce amounted in effect to a prohibition. They were only three. The arbitrary was totally excluded; and accordingly some hundreds of years passed without a single example of that kind. When manners were corrupted, the laws were relaxed; as the latter always follow the former, when they are not able to regulate them or to vanquish them. Of this circumstance the legislators of vice and crime were pleased to take notice, as an inducement to adopt their regulation: holding out an hope that the permission would as rarely be made use of. They knew the contrary to be true; and they had taken good care that the laws should be well seconded by the manners. Their law of divorce, like all their laws, had not for its object the relief of domestic uneasiness, but the total corruption of all morals, the total disconnection of social life. It is a matter of curiosity to observe the operation of this encouragement to disorder. I have before me the Paris paper correspondent to the usual register of births, marriages, and deaths. Divorce, happily, is no regular head of registry amongst civilized nations. With the Jacobins it is remarkable that divorce is not only a regular head, but it has the post of honor. It occupies the first place in the list. In the three first months of the year 1793 the number of divorces in that city amounted to 562; the marriages were 1785: so that the proportion of divorces to marriages was not much less than one to three: a thing unexampled, I believe, among mankind. I caused an inquiry to be made at Doctors' Commons concerning the number of divorces, and found that all the divorces (which, except by special act of Parliament, are separations, and not proper divorces) did not amount in all those courts, and in an hundred years, to much more than one fifth of those that passed in the single city of Paris in three months. I followed up the inquiry relative to that city through several of the subsequent months, until I was tired, and found the proportions still the same. Since then I have heard that they have declared for a revisal of these laws: but I know of nothing done. It appears as if the contract that renovates the world was under no law at all. From this we may take our estimate of the havoc that has been made through all the relations of life. With the Jacobins of France, vague intercourse is without reproach; marriage is reduced to the vilest concubinage; children are encouraged to cut the throats of their parents; mothers are taught that tenderness is no part of their character, and, to demonstrate their attachment to their party, that they ought to make no scruple to rake