Women in England are commonly capable of child-bearing at fourteen, let the other term be forty-eight, when they bear no more; thirty-four years, therefore, an English woman bears children. At the age of fourteen or fifteen they are objects of our love; they are endeared by bearing us children after that time, and none I hope will pretend, that, at forty-eight and fifty, an English woman is not an agreeable companion. Perhaps the last years, to thinking minds, are fully more agreeable than the first. We grow old together, we have a near prospect of dying together; nothing can present a more agreeable picture of social life, than monogamy in England. The Arab, on the other hand, if she begins to bear children at eleven, seldom or never has a child after twenty. The time then of her child-bearing is nine years, and four women, _taken altogether_, have then the term of _thirty-six_. So that the English woman that bears children for thirty-four years, has only two years less than the term enjoyed by the four wives whom Mahomet has allowed; and if it be granted an English wife may bear at fifty, the terms are equal. But there are other grievous differences. An Arabian girl, at _eleven_ years old, by her youth and beauty, is the object of man’s desire; being an infant, however, in understanding, she is not a rational companion for him. A man marries there, say at _twenty_, and before he is thirty, his wife, improved as a companion, ceases to be an object of his desires, and a mother of children; so that all the best, and most vigorous of his days, are spent with a woman he cannot love, and with her he would be destined to live forty, or forty-five years, without comfort to himself by increase of family, or utility to the public. The reasons, then, against polygamy, which subsist in England, do not by any means subsist in Arabia; and that being the case, it would be unworthy of the wisdom of God, and an unevenness in his ways, which we shall never see, to subject two nations, under such different circumstances, absolutely to the same observances.