law, without discussion, whether it injures or benefits your personal interests.  This principle may seem to you a very simple one, but it is difficult of application; it is like sap, which must infiltrate the smallest of the capillary tubes to stir the tree, renew its verdure, develop its flowers, and ripen fruit.  Dear, the laws of society are not all written in a book; manners and customs create laws, the more important of which are often the least known.  Believe me, there are neither teachers, nor schools, nor text-books for the laws that are now to regulate your actions, your language, your visible life, the manner of your presentation to the world, and your quest of fortune.  Neglect those secret laws or fail to understand them, and you stay at the foot of the social system instead of looking down upon it.  Even though this letter may seem to you diffuse, telling you much that you have already thought, let me confide to you a woman’s ethics.

To explain society on the theory of individual happiness adroitly won at the cost of the greater number is a monstrous doctrine, which in its strict application leads men to believe that all they can secretly lay hold of before the law or society or other individuals condemn it as a wrong is honestly and fairly theirs.  Once admit that claim and the clever thief goes free; the woman who violates her marriage vow without the knowledge of the world is virtuous and happy; kill a man, leaving no proof for justice, and if, like Macbeth, you win a crown you have done wisely; your selfish interests become the higher law; the only question then is how to evade, without witnesses or proof, the obstacles which law and morality place between you and your self-indulgence.  To those who hold this view of society, the problem of making their fortune, my dear friend, resolves itself into playing a game where the stakes are millions or the galleys, political triumphs or dishonor.  Still, the green cloth is not long enough for all the players, and a certain kind of genius is required to play the game.  I say nothing of religious beliefs, nor yet of feelings; what concerns us now is the running-gear of the great machine of gold and iron, and its practical results with which men’s lives are occupied.  Dear child of my heart, if you share my horror at this criminal theory of the world, society will present to your mind, as it does to all sane minds, the opposite theory of duty.  Yes, you will see that man owes himself to man in a thousand differing ways.  To my mind, the duke and peer owe far more to the workman and the pauper than the pauper and the workman owe to the duke.  The obligations of duty enlarge in proportion to the benefits which society bestows on men; in accordance with the maxim, as true in social politics as in business, that the burden of care and vigilance is everywhere in proportion to profits.  Each man pays his debt in his own way.  When our poor toiler at the Rhetoriere comes home weary with his