Let your secretary no longer evade--no longer equivocate, respecting the carnage of the Midianites and their villages. I feel great concern that your butcher-priest Eleazar, general of the Jewish armies, should have found in that little miserable and desert country, seventy-five thousand oxen, sixty-one thousand asses, and six hundred and seventy-five thousand sheep, without reckoning the rams and the lambs. Now if you took thirty-two thousand infant girls, it is likely that there were as many infant boys, and as many fathers and mothers. These united amount to a hundred and twenty-eight thousand captives, in a desert where there is nothing to eat, nothing to drink but brackish water, and which is inhabited by some wandering Arabs, to the number of two or three thousand at most. You will besides observe, that, on all the maps, this frightful country is not more than eight leagues long, and as many broad. But were it as large, as fertile, and as populous as Normandy or the Milanese, no matter. I hold to the text, which says, the Lord's share was thirty-two maidens. Confound as you please Midian by the Red Sea with Midian by Sodom; I shall still demand an account of my thirty-two thousand virgins. Have you employed your secretary to calculate how many oxen and maidens the fine country of Midian is capable of feeding? Gentlemen, I inhabit a canton which is not the Land of Promise; but we have a lake much finer than that of Sodom, and our soil is moderately productive. Your secretary tells me that an acre of Midian will feed three oxen: I assure you, gentlemen, that with us an acre will feed but one. If your secretary will triple the revenue of my lands, I will give him good wages, and will not pay him with drafts on the receivers-general. He will not find a better situation in all the country of Midian than with me; but unfortunately this man knows no more of oxen than he does of golden calves. As for the thirty-two thousand maidenheads, I wish him joy of them. Our little country is as large as Midian. It contains about four thousand drunkards, a dozen attorneys, two men of sense, and four thousand persons of the fair sex, who are not uniformly pretty. These together make about eight thousand people, supposing that the registrar who gave me the account did not exaggerate by one-half, according to custom. Either your priests or ours would have had considerable difficulty in finding thirty-two thousand virgins for their use in our country. This makes me very doubtful concerning the numberings of the Roman people, at the time when their empire extended just four leagues from the Tarpeian rock, and they carried a handful of hay at the end of a pole for a standard. Perhaps you do not know that the Romans passed five hundred years in plundering their neighbors before they had any historian, and that their numberings, like their miracles, are very suspicious.