Читать книгу Owen's Moral Physiology; or, A Brief and Plain Treatise on the Population Question онлайн

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It has been remarked, that nothing is so suspicious in a woman, as vehement pretensions to especial chastity; it is no less true, that the most obtrusive and sensitive stickler for the etiquette of orthodox morality is the heartless rake. The little intercourse I have had with men of your stamp, warns me to avoid the serious discussion of any species of moral heresy with you. You approach the subject in a tone and spirit revolting alike to good taste and good feeling. You seem to pre-suppose—from your own experience, perhaps—that the hearts of all men, and more especially of all women, are deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; that violence and vice are inherent in human nature, and that nothing but laws and ceremonies prevent the world from becoming a vast slaughter-house, or an universal brothel. You judge your own sex and the other by the specimens you have met with in wretched haunts of mercenary profligacy; and, with such a standard in you minds, I marvel not that you remain incorrigible unbelievers in any virtue, but that which is forced on the prudish hotbed of ceremonious orthodoxy. I wonder not that you will not trust the natural soil, watered from the free skies and warmed by the life-bringing sun. How should you? you have never seen it produce but weeds and poisons. Libertines and debauchees! cast my book aside! You will find in it nothing to gratify a licentious curiosity; and, if you read it, you will probably only give me credit for motives and impulses like your own.