The voluntary childless marriages of to-day have served to show the possibility of such unions outside legal marriage, and such free unions are becoming, as Mrs. Parsons points out, “a progressive substitute for marriage."[270] The gradual but steady rise in the age for entering on legal marriage also points in the same direction, though it indicates not merely an increase of free unions but an increase of all forms of normal and abnormal sexuality outside marriage.  Thus in England and Wales, in 1906, only 43 per 1,000 husbands and 146 per 1,000 wives were under age, while the average age for husbands was 28.6 years and for wives 26.4 years.  For men the age has gone up some eight months during the past forty years, for women more than this.  In the large cities, like London, where the possibilities of extra-matrimonial relationships are greater, the age for legal marriage is higher than in the country.

If we are to regard the age of legal marriage as, on the whole, the age at which the population enters into sexual unions, it is undoubtedly too late.  Beyer, a leading German neurologist, finds that there are evils alike in early and in late marriage, and comes to the conclusion that in temperate zones the best age for women to marry is the twenty-first year, and for men the twenty-fifth year.

Yet, under bad economic conditions and with a rigid marriage law, early marriages are in every respect disastrous.  They are among the poor a sign of destitution.  The very poorest marry first, and they do so through the feeling that their condition cannot be worse. (Dr. Michael Ryan brought together much interesting evidence concerning the causes of early marriage in Ireland in his Philosophy of Marriage, 1837, pp. 58-72).  Among the poor, therefore, early marriage is always a misfortune.  “Many good people,” says Mr. Thomas Holmes, Secretary of the Howard Association and missionary at police courts (in an interview, Daily Chronicle, Sept. 8, 1906), “advise boys and girls to get married in order to prevent what they call a ‘disgrace.’  This I consider to be absolutely wicked, and it leads to far greater evils than it can possibly avert.”

Early marriages are one of the commonest causes both of prostitution and divorce.  They lead to prostitution in innumerable cases, even when no outward separation takes place.  The fact that they lead to divorce is shown by the significant circumstance that in England, although only 146 per 1,000 women are under twenty-one at marriage, of the wives concerned in divorce cases, 280 per 1,000 were under twenty-one at marriage, and this discrepancy is even greater than it appears, for in the well-to-do class, which can alone afford the luxury of divorce, the normal age at marriage is much higher than for the population generally.  Inexperience, as was long ago pointed out by Milton (who had learnt this lesson to his cost), leads to shipwreck in marriage.  “They who