On a question of a divorce-bill brought on, not long since, in the House of Commons, you may recollect that a member was laughed at, for asserting that if men expected women to reform, they ought to begin by reforming themselves. For my part, I conceive the idea to be perfectly just. Infidelity on the woman's side is, unquestionably, more hurtful to society than a failure of the same sort on the man's; yet, is it reasonable to suppose women to be so exempt from human frailty, as to preserve their chastity inviolate, when men set them so bad an example?
[LETTER LXXXVIII.]
Paris, April 3, 1802.
Circumstances have at length occurred to recall me to England, and as this will, probably, be the last letter that you will receive from me before I have the pleasure of taking you by the hand, I shall devote it to miscellaneous subjects, and, without studying any particular arrangement, speak of them at random, just as they chance to present themselves.
A fellow-creature, whose care-worn countenance and emaciated body claimed a mite from any one who had a mite to bestow, had taken his stand at the gate-way just now as I entered. The recollection of his tale of woe being uppermost in my mind, I begin with
MENDICANTS.
In spite of the calamities which all great political convulsions never fail to engender, the streets of Paris present not at this day that vast crowd of beggars, covered with rags and vermin, by which they were formerly infested. This is to be attributed to the partial adoption of measures for employing the poor; and, doubtless, when receptacles come to be established here, according to the salutary plans introduced into Bavaria by Count Rumford, mendicity will be gradually annihilated.
But, if beggars have decreased in Paris, this is not the case with
PAWNBROKERS.
They seem to have multiplied in proportion to the increase of the number of opportunities afforded for gambling in the lottery, that is, in the ratio of 21 to 2.[[1]]