It is true that love is not infallible.  It is still, as Browning puts it, “blind, oft-failing, half-enlightened.”  It may be said that marriage itself is not necessary for the maintenance of the species; but it is useful both for its maintenance and its improvement; hence natural selection has favored it—­especially the monogamous form—­in the interest of coming generations. Love is simply an extension of this process—–­making it efficacious before marriage and thus quintupling its importance.  It makes many mistakes, for it is a young instinct, and it has to do with a very complex problem, so that its development is slow; but it has a great future, especially now that intelligence is beginning to encourage and help it.  But while admitting that love is fallible we must be careful not to decry it for mistakes with which it has no concern.  It is absurd to suppose that every self-made match is a love-match:  yet, whenever such a marriage is a failure, love is held responsible.  We must remember, too, that there are two kinds of love and that the lower kind does not choose as wisely as the higher.  Where animal passion alone is involved, parents cannot be blamed for trying to curb it.  As a rule, love of all kinds can be checked or even cured, and an effort to do this should be made in all cases where it is found to be bestowed on a person likely to taint the offspring with vicious propensities or serious disease.  But, with all its liability to error, romantic love is usually the safest guide to marriage, and even sensual love of the more refined, esthetic type is ordinarily preferable to what are called marriages of reason, because love (as distinguished from abnormal, unbridled lust) always is guided by youth and health, thus insuring a healthy, vigorous offspring.

If it be asked, “Are not the parents who arrange the marriages of reason also guided as a rule by considerations of health, moral and physical?” the answer is a most emphatic “No.”  Parental fondness, sufficing for the preservation and rearing of children, is a very old thing, but parental affection, which is altruistically concerned for the weal of children in after-life, is a comparatively modern invention.  The foregoing chapters have taught us that an Australian father’s object in giving his daughter in marriage was to get in exchange a new girl-wife for himself; what became of the daughter, or what sort of a man got her, did not concern him in the least.  Among Africans and American Indians the object of bringing up daughters and giving them in marriage was to secure cows or ponies in return for them.  In India the object of marriage was the rearing of sons or daughters’ sons for the purpose of saving the souls of their parents from perdition; so they flung them into the arms of anyone who would take them.  The Greeks and the Hebrews married to perpetuate their family name or to supply the state with soldiers.  In Japan and China ancestral and family considerations have always been of infinitely more importance than the individual inclinations or happiness of the bridal couple.  Wherever we look we find this topsy-turvy state of affairs—­marriages made to suit the parents instead of the bride and groom; while the welfare of the grandchildren is of course never dreamt of.