their own parents or brethren; but the censure falls upon the whole nation:  and ‘no money, no Swiss,’ is a proverb throughout the world.  It is, amidst those scenes of prostitution and bastardy, impossible for men in general to respect the female sex to the degree that they formerly did; while numbers will be apt to adopt the unjust sentiment of the old bachelor, POPE, that ’every woman is, at heart, a rake.’

241.  Who knows, I say, in what degree the employment of men-operators may have tended to produce this change, so injurious to the female sex?  Aye, and to encourage unfeeling and brutal men to propose that the dead bodies of females, if poor, should be sold for the purpose of exhibition and dissection before an audience of men; a proposition that our ‘rude ancestors’ would have answered, not by words, but by blows!  Alas! our women may talk of ‘small-clothes’ as long as they please; they may blush to scarlet at hearing animals designated by their sexual appellations; it may, to give the world a proof of our excessive modesty and delicacy, even pass a law (indeed we have done it) to punish ’an exposure of the person’; but as long as our streets swarm with prostitutes, our asylums and private houses with bastards; as long as we have man-operators in the delicate cases alluded to, and as long as the exhibiting of the dead body of a virtuous female before an audience of men shall not be punished by the law, and even with death; as long as we shall appear to be satisfied in this state of things, it becomes us, at any rate, to be silent about purity of mind, improvement of manners, and an increase of refinement and delicacy.

242.  This practice has brought the ‘doctor’ into every family in the kingdom, which is of itself no small evil.  I am not thinking of the expense; for, in cases like these, nothing in that way ought to be spared.  If necessary to the safety of his wife, a man ought not only to part with his last shilling, but to pledge his future labour.  But we all know that there are imaginary ailments, many of which are absolutely created by the habit of talking with or about the ‘doctor.’  Read the ‘DOMESTIC MEDICINE,’ and by the time that you have done, you will imagine that you have, at times, all the diseases of which it treats.  This practice has added to, has doubled, aye, has augmented, I verily believe, ten-fold the number of the gentlemen who are, in common parlance, called ‘doctors’; at which, indeed, I, on my own private account, ought to rejoice; for, invariably I have, even in the worst of times, found them every where amongst my staunchest and kindest friends.  But though these gentlemen are not to blame for this, any more than attorneys are for their increase in number; and amongst these gentlemen, too, I have, with very few exceptions, always found sensible men and zealous friends; though the parties pursuing these professions