LETTER CXIV. Usbek to the Same.

THOU inquirest from what cause the earth is less populous than it was formerly; and if thou considerest carefully, thou wilt find that this great difference comes from that which hath happened in our manners. Since the Christian and Mahometan religions have divided the Roman world, things have been greatly changed: these two religions have been far from being so favourable to the propagation of our species, as that of those lords of the universe. Among the Romans, polygamy was prohibited; and by that law it had a very great advantage over the Mahometan religion: divorces were also allowed, which gave it another, and no less considerable advantage over the Christian. I find nothing so contradictory as this plurality of wives permitted by the holy Koran, and the order of satisfying them commanded in the same book. Converse with your wives, says the prophet, because ye are as necessary to them as their vestments, and they are as necessary to you as your own vestments. See here a precept which renders the life of a true Mussulman very laborious. He who hath the four wives settled by law, and only as many concubines, or slaves, must not he be weighed down with so many vestments? Your wives are your tillage, saith the prophet; apply yourselves therefore to your tillage: do good for your souls, and you shall one day find your recompence. I consider a good Mussulman as a champion, destined always to be fighting; but who, soon weakened and weighed down with his first fatigues, saints in the very field of battle, and finds himself, as may be said, to be

buried beneath his own triumphs. Nature ever acts slowly, and as one may say, sparingly; her operations are never violent, even in her productions she requires temperance: she constantly goes on by rule and measure: if she is precipitated, she falls into a languor; she employs all her remaining strength for her own preservation, quite losing her productive virtue and generative power. It is to this state of debility we are always reduced by so great a number of women, who are fitter to exhaust, than satisfy us. It is very common among us, to see a man with a very great seraglio, and yet a very small number of children; these children too are generally weak and unhealthy, and feel the imbecility of their fathers. This is not all: these women, obliged to a forced continence, have need of people to guard them, who can be none but eunuchs: religion, jealousy, reason itself will permit no others to approach them: these guardians must be numerous, to the end they may maintain peace within doors amidst the continual contentions of these women, and prevent attempts from without. So that a man who hath ten wives, or concubines, must have no fewer eunuchs to guard them. But what a loss to society, so great a number of men, dead as it were from their birth! What depopulation must follow! The female slaves kept in the seraglio, to wait with the eunuchs upon this great number of women, almost always growing old in an afflicting virginity: they cannot marry while they stay there; and their mistresses, when once used to them, will hardly ever dismiss them. See how many persons of both sexes a single man employs for his pleasures; they are dead to the state, and rendered useless in the propagation of the species. Constantinople and Ispahan are the capitals of the two greatest empires in the world: it is there that every thing ought to terminate, and where every body, drawn by a thousand different ways, should come from all parts. Yet even these cities decay of themselves, and would soon be destroyed, if the sovereigns did not, almost every century, make whole nations remove thither to repeople them. I will continue this subject in another letter.

Paris, the 13th of the moon Chahban,
1718.