Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 1.djvu/398

288 ther, we have a near prospect of dying together; nothing can present a more agreeable picture of social life, than monogamy in England.

Arab, on the other hand, if she begins to bear children at eleven, seldom or never has a child after twenty. The time then of her child-bearing is nine years, and four women, taken altogether, have then the term of thirty-six. So that the English woman that bears children for thirty-four years, has only two years less than the term enjoyed by the four wives whom Mahomet has allowed; and if it be granted an English wife may bear at fifty, the terms are equal.

there are other grievous differences. An Arabian girl, at eleven years old, by her youth and beauty, is the object of man's desire; being an infant, however, in understanding, she is not a rational companion for him. A man marries there, say at twenty, and before he is thirty, his wife, improved as a companion, ceases to be an object of his desires, and a mother of children; so that all the best, and most vigorous of his days, are spent with a woman he cannot love, and with her he would be destined to live forty, or forty-five years, without comfort to himself by increase of family, or utility to the public.

reasons, then, against polygamy, which subsist in England, do not by any means subsist in Arabia; and that being the case, it would be unworthy of the wisdom of God, and an unevenness in his ways, which we shall never see, to subject two nations, under such different circumstances, absolutely to the same observances.