city. Lastly, until 1789, legislation, although moderating its severity, remains undecided, varies according to place, circumstance, and even social position; but the atrocious and coarse penalties of ancient times are abolished and forgotten.
XII. Adultery in the Past and in the Future.
Like all our ethnographical studies, this also affirms the law of progress. We have seen savagery pass into barbarism, and barbarism into civilisation. We have seen adultery punished at first as a robbery—but a most execrable robbery—and the chastisement falling chiefly on the woman as being a property in revolt. For her alone fidelity is obligatory. As to the adulterous husband, he is punished, if at all, on the ground of having abused the property of another, and not in the least because he has been unfaithful to his own wife. By slow degrees, however, equity asserts certain rights, and at the same time customs are humanised; marriage becomes less and less a "contract of slavery" for the woman; and, in spite of the recoil caused by catholicism, progress resumes its course, and we begin to foresee the time when, marriage being instituted on rational and just foundations, adultery will disappear, or nearly so, from our customs and our laws.
But surely that time is far distant. Our conscience is still so impregnated with the morality of past ages that our public opinion and our juries willingly pardon a man who murders his adulterous wife, while they are full of mercy for the conjugal infidelities of this ferocious justiciary. The antique morals which hold woman as a servile property belonging to her husband still live in many minds. They will be extinguished by degrees. The matrimonial contract will end by being the same kind of contract as any other, freely accepted, freely maintained, freely dissolved; but where constraint has disappeared deception becomes an unworthy offence. Such will be the opinion of a future humanity, more elevated morally than ours. Doubtless it will have no longer any tender indulgence for conveniently dissimulated adultery, but, on the other hand, it will no longer excuse the avenging husband.
