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conduct too much cool and artificial for men in that imperfect state of society. It is making savages, who feel the ties of society very feebly, the impulses of passion in their utmost force, act more as citizens than as men. Besides, they are the women chiefly who enjoy the privilege of protecting prisoners by adoption; and to ascribe to them such motives would be to make policy prevail over nature in their hearts. We might rather arrange nature against nature, and suppose that the softness of that sex, more prone to compassion than men, only yielded to the natural impulses of kindness in their own breasts when they rescued an unhappy victim from torture. But another fact equally characteristic of the sex seems to stand in opposition to this. Their weakness inclines them to more cruelty than men, and even the sensibility of their hearts, and the irritability of their feelings render them much more bitter and atrocious in their revenge. For this reason, the warriors frequently resign a prisoner, who has been destined to the flames, to some woman who has lost a husband, or a son in the late actions, that she may appease her grief by venting upon him all the vengeance of her heart. She leads the way, she sets the example, she incites the ac-

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tors in all the torments he is made to suffer. Her rage makers her ingenious in inventing new modes of torture. 
It is true that women, in different situations, are equally prone to kindness and to cruelty. And from the influence of these principles we derive in part at least, the causes of two moral phenomena so contradictory, and apparently so irreconcileable. Those whose hearts are sore from the recent loss of their friends, irritated almost to madness, set no bounds to their fury. Those, on the other hand, in whose breasts the edge of grief has been blunted by time, and the first transports of revenge have subsided, regaining the softness natural to the sex, more easily admit the returning sentiments of humanity. 
But there are other motives which govern them in this extraordinary act. A woman who has lost a husband, in that rude condition of society where no artificial ties exist to attach her forever to his memory, and no delicacies of sentiment and manners, created by the state of the public morals, check her desires of a new connexion, finds, at length, the emotions of grief subside, and give way to the demands of nature.