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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: would be worse than useless. Its indulgence would work no end of
disturbance to the community at large, beside entailing much misery
upon its individual victim. Its exercise would probably be classed
with kleptomania and other like excesses of purely personal
consideration. The community could never permit the practice, for
it strikes at the very root of their whole social system.
The immense loss in happiness to these people in consequence of the
omission by the too parsimonious Fates of that thread, which, with
us, spins the whole of woman's web of life, and at least weaves the
warp of man's, is but incidental to the present subject; the effect
of the loss upon the individuality of the person himself is what
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