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Show SELECTED. MARRIAGE IN FRANCE. The dieteem in which marriase ii held in Fracee has lone been a subject . ol' comment by moralists and political : economists. KotwithstaDuingthe pro-tes:ation3 pro-tes:ation3 of patriotic Frenchmen, a vride-spread belief obtains that in their country, as a general thing, there is a preference of lawless to lawful love, and that the bonds of matrimony are rather shunned than sought after. The Grounds for this belief are not merely the casual observations ol' travelers, but the testimony of natives, and still more, the tone and teachings of the most admired French literature. Wedded Wed-ded happiness is treated in nearly every French work of fiction as ridiculous, ridicu-lous, if not impossible, while no pains are spared to depict the romantic felicity of the men a-nd women who despise the vu'par trammels with which society and religion have hampered ham-pered the relation of the sexes. A French lawyer named Ernest Cadet has recently investigated the subject in the light of statistical facts,1 and the results he has arrived at go far to support the popular opinion. In i 178-1 there was, he finds, one marriage 1 to every 103 inhabitants, while in 1S41 ! there was but one to 121, and at the ! .present day one to 127. This, it must be remembered, is in the face of the! advance of civilization, and the greater j facilities now existing for the support of a family, lie tiuds acain that the number of illegitimate children born in France in 1S4I was 74,000, and it is now 77,000. In Paris and its environs 38 per cent, of al! the children arc born out of wedlock. The French law admits ol' no divorce, but only of separation. In 1S41 there were 1,07S suits fur separation, and the annual number now is nearly .1,000. Taking the population of France at 38,000,000, the number of marriages in a year, at the rate of one to 127 of population, would be about 300,000. It Jbllows that one out of every luO French marriages is, therefore, there-fore, unhappy, to the extent of legal rupture, without mentioning the vast number in addition which are secretly or openly broken without tho sanction of the tribunals. These things are worthy of mention, not by way of reproach to France, but as a warning to the world in general. It is the sober belief of thoughtful people tbat the recent discomfiture of France in her contest with Prussia was owing to the deterioration of her men through the prevalence of sexual licentiousness. licen-tiousness. The vices of the wealthy and luxurious classes, spreading downward through the mass of the people.have corrupted cor-rupted their stamina and sapped their vigor. But what has happened to France may happen to any other nation. na-tion. The exposures daily making in this city of the immoral practices of our young men and women are terrible, terri-ble, not merely lor the intrinsic wickedness wick-edness involved in them, but as indications indi-cations of deep-seated disease. No country can be regarded as safe when any large proportion of its citizens habitually violate the obligations of morality, and still less when they resort re-sort to unhallowed means for escaping the consequences of their sins. If the recent revelations of woman and child murder arc to bo accepted as indications indica-tions of what is constantly going on, it is quite time that we ceased to point the finger of scorn at France and attended at-tended to our own need of reform. N. Y. Sun. |