You will not, I trust, do me the wrong of believing that I, wavering in
my faith, intend forthwith to abandon the principles in which I was
brought up. But a subject so serious as the one I have been devoting
myself to, demands the most frank and honest examination. I will not
deliver a judgment; I will merely state the facts. Now it is an
established fact that the people who permit by their laws a plurality of
wives are, even at the present time, far more numerous than the
monogamists. Statistics prove that out of the thousand million
inhabitants of this globe, Christianity with all its sects, and Judaism
thrown in, does not number more than two hundred and sixty millions
according to Balbi, or two hundred and forty millions according to the
London Bible Society.

Since the remainder, consisting of Mahometans, Buddhists,
Fire-worshippers, and Idolaters, all practise polygamy more or less, it
follows that on this globe of ours, the monogamists constitute
one-fourth only of the whole population. Such is the naked, unadorned
truth!

Are we wrong? Are they right? It is not my business to decide this
point. Philosophers and theologians far more patient than I am, have
given it up as a bad job. Voltaire, with his subtle genius, settled the
question in his own characteristic fashion, by supposing that an
imaginary God had from the beginning decreed an inequality in this
matter, regulated by geographical situation, in these words:-"I shall draw a line from Mount Caucasus to Egypt, and from Egypt to
Mount Atlas; all men dwelling to the east of this line shall be
permitted to marry several wives, while those to the west of it shall
have one only."