Everyone who knows the literature of that time, must know what I mean:
what had gone on for more than a century, it may be more than two, in
France, in Italy, and--I am sorry to have to say it--Germany likewise.
All historians know what I mean, and how enormous was the evil. I only
wonder that they have so much overlooked that item in the causes of the
Revolution. It seems to me to have been more patent and potent in the
sight of men, as it surely was in the sight of Almighty God, than all the
political and economic wrongs put together. They might have issued in a
change of dynasty or of laws. That, issued in the blood of the
offenders. Not a girl was enticed into Louis XV.'s Petit Trianon, or
other den of aristocratic iniquity, but left behind her, parents nursing
shame and sullen indignation, even while they fingered the ill-gotten
price of their daughter's honour; and left behind also, perhaps, some
unhappy boy of her own class, in whom disappointment and jealousy were
transformed--and who will blame him?--into righteous indignation, and a
very sword of God; all the more indignant, and all the more righteous, if
education helped him to see, that the maiden's acquiescence, her pride in
her own shame, was the ugliest feature in the whole crime, and the most
potent reason for putting an end, however fearful, to a state of things
in which such a fate was thought an honour and a gain, and not a disgrace
and a ruin; in which the most gifted daughters of the lower classes had
learnt to think it more noble to become--that which they became--than the
wives of honest men.

If you will read fairly the literature of the Ancien Regime, whether in
France or elsewhere, you will see that my facts are true. If you have
human hearts in you, you will see in them, it seems to me, an explanation
of many a guillotinade and fusillade, as yet explained only on the ground
of madness--an hypothesis which (as we do not yet in the least understand