Where
this is the case in other countries, the results are also analogous. We
find, for example, that the early emancipation of the young from
domestic and paternal authority is common to North America with Italy.
Later on, in the more generous natures, a tie of freer affection grows
up between parents and children.
It is, in fact, a matter of extreme difficulty to judge fairly of other
nations in the sphere of character and feeling. In these respects a
people may be developed highly, and yet in a manner so strange that a
foreigner is utterly unable to understand it. Perhaps all the nations
of the West are in this point equally favored.
But where the imagination has exercised the most powerful and despotic
influence on morals is in the illicit intercourse of the two sexes. It
is well known that prostitution was freely practiced in the Middle
Ages, before the appearance of syphilis. A discussion, however, on
these questions does not belong to our present work. What seems
characteristic of Italy at this time, is that here marriage and its
rights were more often and more deliberately trampled underfoot than
anywhere else. The girls of the higher classes were carefully secluded,
and of them we do not speak. All passion was directed to the married
women.
Under these circumstances it is remarkable that, so far as we know,
there was no diminution in the number of marriages, and that family
life by no means underwent that disorganization which a similar state
of things would have produced in the North.
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