to inquisitorial interference with the strictly private matters of domestic life.

The really important social epoch of marriage is at the birth of the first child; and after that event, divorce should be more difficult and carefully guarded by society, in the interests of the child or children. These interests, however, may often be far better secured by parental divorce, than by enforced parental union, and private friends, chosen by the parties and approved by the legal court, should be charged with the duty of private investigation and settlement of the questions at issue. Arbitration of mutual friends acting under the dictates of common sense and from experience of the human nature around us, is a social force likely to adjudicate more justly and wisely, in reference to these delicate relations of life, than public officials applying the antiquated regulations, which are survivals of an old régime, neither well adapted to the conditions of modern life, nor to the complexity of modern humanity.

The law concerning parental guardianship, which efforts are now being made to alter, is a manifest survival from the epoch when man ignorantly believed that father and child were more closely and vitally related than mother and child! We are surely sufficiently advanced to perceive that the parental relation does not so differ, and to demand that for the two sexes equality of parental rights and duties should be recorded in the statute book, and justice be made the basis of our marriage laws.

Legal changes are required in two directions, viz. towards greater freedom as to marriage and greater strictness as to parentage. The marriage union is essentially a private matter with which society has no call and no right to interfere. Childbirth, on the contrary, is a public event. It touches the interests of the whole nation. The simplest form of marriage is the best. We should do well to follow the ancient Romans, and adopt the usus with its natural consequence—that the wife if young remains under the guardianship of her parents. But as regards childbirth we must become Spartans, and with firmness and fidelity assume censorship, and, to some extent, control over action that affects the order of society, and the entire well-being of the coming race.

In reference to both, our customs at the present moment are destitute of common sense. We sanction, by religious services, the mercenary marriages that in our hearts we condemn. We emphasize with social pomp and ceremony the

THE NECESSITY FOR MARRIAGE.

321

commencement of unions that in our present evil social state may speedily terminate in private misery and public disgrace, whilst we view with patient serenity and without public comment or rebuke, a careless, heartless assumption of parental responsibilities and an utter neglect of a great social duty, viz. that of transmitting only to the incoming generation ancestral purity and physical, mental, and moral health.

In a scientific age man is bound to recognize physiological reasons for early marriage and physiological reasons for delayed parentage. Of the former, I have here to say that an early moderate stimulation of the female sexual organs (after puberty is reached) tends, by the law of exercise promoting development of structure, to make parturition in mature life casy and safe; and that the healthy functional and emotional life of the marriage union is the best preventive of hysteria, chlorosis, love melancholy, and other unhappy ailments to which our young women are cruelly and barbarously exposed, and which, I do not hesitate to say, make them in many cases feel their youth to be an almost insufferable martyrdom. There are no less serious sexual evils which overtake masculine youth, if chaste and debarred from early marriage, i.e. persistent and mentally irritating cravings, self-abuse, etc. To these I need not, however, further allude.

Conscious evolution demands that the eyes of the public shall be opened to the necessity for marriage, and the great difficulties that lie in the way of true marriage, in order that all obstacles to human happiness, save such as are inevitable, may be bravely grappled with and overcome. The ineffectual gropings of unconscious humanity propelled by blind necessity are touching to enlightened minds. That civilized men and women, who for mutual happiness require the closest unions of affection, should ever have invented the miserable device of matrimonial agencies, and that these should be commercially profitable,* speaks volumes on the unsatisfactory state of our social life. Many newspaper advertisements under the heading Matrimony" are genuine, and genuine also was a poor man's written appeal to the superintendent of a workhouse: "Sir, I am in lodgings and have no home. Could I have a tidy woman from your institution which could make me a tidy wife?"

66

Not so much with the uneducated, however, as amongst the educated and those of gentle birth is there lacking, that free

*The Matrimonial News journal is here referred to, and there are various matrimonial agencies on the Continent.

Y

dom of access which might suffice for that discerning which is undoubtedly the only sure antecedent to true marriage. There are in the present day thousands of men situated as was Anthony Trollope during seven critical years of life. He lived in solitary lodgings in that great London, where he says, "There was no house in which I could habitually see a lady's face and hear a lady's voice. No allurement to decent respectability came in my way." How was he to spend his evenings? The alternatives before him were, a life not respectable, or in solitary lodgings, to sit for hours "reading good books and drinking tea." Frankly he tells us, "It seems to me that in such circumstances the temptations of loose life will almost certainly prevail with a young man. . . . The temptations at any rate prevailed with me." * Later in his "Autobiography" he speaks of his marriage, and adds, "I ought to name that happy day as the commencement of my better life."

A social system that, on the one hand, leaves thousands of educated women without daily intercourse with educated men, and therefore renders them unable to comprehend a man's pleasures, thoughts, duties, the responsibilities of his profession, or the bearings of any public question in which he takes a part, and, on the other hand, leaves thousands of gentlemen utterly unable to "habitually see a lady's face and hear a lady's voice!"--such a system is a failure, and worse than a failure in respect to necessary qualifications for promoting the happiness and moral well-being of man.

Let all social reformers aid in radical reform, viz. in the evolving of a new system which will bring men and women together in close relations of a frank, pure, and healthy character-friendships, that are intimate, affectionate, faithful, to the benefit and enjoyment of all, and true marriage based on discernment of individual nature for all who desire to marry in so far as disproportion of sex will allow.

Wealth must no longer figure as the chief promoter of human happiness. Wealth must be discrowned, and many products of wealth will have to be renounced. It is not in pomp, glitter, or show, in luxurious and extravagant living that the new system will be evolved. It will declare itself in simplicity of domestic and social life, by sympathetic combination in all the sacred duties and varied enjoyments of life, and by the clear enunciation of the principle that in the sphere of the emotions man finds his highest and purest solace, in universal kindliness and love the satisfaction of his being."

* 66

"An Autobiography," by Anthony Trollope, vol. i. p. 69.

CHAPTER XVIII.

HEREDITY.

"The first step towards the reduction of disease is beginning at the beginning to provide for the health of the unborn.”—Dr. RICHARDSON.

The laws of heredity constitute the most important agency whereby the vital forces, the vigour and soundness of the physical system, are changed for better or worse."-NATHAN ALLEN, M.D., LL.D.

WHERE individual life is not menaced by poverty or destitution, disease is the bane of existence, the great obstacle to human happiness. Calm resignation and even an exalted condition of inward peace are compatible with disease; but bright spirits, elastic exuberant joyfulness, are unattainable without some approach to sound health. And alas! how few of us have any permanent possession of sound health. Sickness and pain dog our footsteps from infancy up to maturity, and onwards to death; and that in spite of medical science, of sanitary protection, of enormous strides made during the last hundred years in the knowledge of pathological conditions, and of vast resources now at our command for subduing and mitigating every form of physical evil.

If I turn my thoughts to the life-histories of the friends I know well, everywhere I perceive wounds and scars left by our common enemy disease. I see mothers whose lighthearted buoyancy died out when the children whom they had guarded with the fondest care were carried to the grave; husbands deprived by death in child-birth of the chosen companions of their lives-the young wasting in consumption— the middle-aged bowed down by chronic ailments, the aged martyrs to rheumatism, paralysis, gout. In every direction there is disease made visible, or poison germs lying latent, ready to awake and carry sickness and sorrow into wide circles

of human life.

Nor is this direct physical suffering even, the weightiest evil in the case. Its indirect effects in sympathetic pain and sorrow, in the torments of mental anxiety and nervous fears, in the anticipation of unutterable griefs, these are beyond calculation, and yet so real, as to appal the mind that for one moment strives to conceive and dwell upon them.

The undeveloped nervous system of the savage, his weak feelings and callous nature, enable him to live his life at a tolerably even level. The height, depth, and breadth of emotion, in the civilized man, is to him unknown. Civilization has altered the nerve structure, developed and revealed its latent powers, and transformed a gross thick-skinned humanity into a vital instrument of innumerable strings, ready to thrill, to vibrate, and to throb, responsive to every wave that moves within its wide-reaching sphere. The waves, however, that circle persistently round us are those of sorrow. The delicate instrument of man's emotions vibrates to mortal anguish, and thrills to accents of despair. At no time in the history of our race has the capacity for happiness and the subjective need of happiness been so great; whilst at no former time has human misery been so openly revealed and keenly felt. In view of the complexity of man's nature, and of his civilized life, and in view of the intimate action and interaction of physical pain and mental sorrow, the great problem of how happiness is to be achieved overwhelms one with bewilderment and dismay. But hope persistently whispers, human reason has latent powers, science has resources as yet untried, and the application of these to the very mightiest of tasks may, nay will sweep the world forward to happy issues which we can but dimly foresee.

*

There is an assembly, says Dr. Richardson, of learned men, of earnest men, bent on understanding to the full human failures from health. These men spare no pains; to gain a spark of light they will labour like miners in a mine. Observe, the subject-matter of these men's study is, "human failures from health." In other words, behind and below actual disease in all its forms, the cause or causes of disease are being diligently searched for. The world is at last beginning to "awaken to the fact, that the life of the individual is in some real sense a prolongation of those of his ancestry. His vigour, his character, his diseases are principally derived from theirs; sometimes his

* Unfortunately we have no earnest band of women devoted to this cause, although this field of inquiry is one in which science specially requires female aid.