The Women Of Fortune Here, As Well As Everywhere Else, Have Nurses
To Suckle Their Children; And The Total Want Of Chastity In The
Lower Class Of Women Frequently Renders Them Very Unfit For The
Trust.
You have sometimes remarked to me the difference of the manners of
the country girls in England and in America; attributing the reserve
of the former to the climate - to the absence of genial suns.
But it
must be their stars, not the zephyrs, gently stealing on their
senses, which here lead frail women astray. Who can look at these
rocks, and allow the voluptuousness of nature to be an excuse for
gratifying the desires it inspires? We must therefore, find some
other cause beside voluptuousness, I believe, to account for the
conduct of the Swedish and American country girls; for I am led to
conclude, from all the observations I have made, that there is
always a mixture of sentiment and imagination in voluptuousness, to
which neither of them have much pretension.
The country girls of Ireland and Wales equally feel the first
impulse of nature, which, restrained in England by fear or delicacy,
proves that society is there in a more advanced state. Besides, as
the mind is cultivated, and taste gains ground, the passions become
stronger, and rest on something more stable than the casual
sympathies of the moment. Health and idleness will always account
for promiscuous amours; and in some degree I term every person idle,
the exercise of whose mind does not bear some proportion to that of
the body.
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