Page:An account of a voyage to establish a colony at Port Philip in Bass's Strait.djvu/94

( 69 ) nearly two thirds of his days united to a disgusting mummy, useless to society, else the depravity of human nature, joined to the irritation of unsatisfied passions, would lead him to get rid of the incumberance by clandestine means. This confinement to a single wife, in the European settlements of Asia and America, is one of the principal causes of the unbounded licentiousness in the men, and the spirit of intrigue in the women. In the Brasils, the licentious intercourse of the sexes perhaps equals what we are told prevailed in the most degenerate period of Imperial Rome. The primary cause of this general corruption of manners, must be referred to climate, which acts forcibly in giving strength to the physical properties of love. In proportion as the passion for enjoyment is cited,