have lived most loosely,” he wrote, “prove most successful in their matches, because their wild affections, unsettling at will, have been so many divorces to teach them experience.”

Miss Clapperton, referring to the educated classes, advocates very early marriage, even during student life, which might then be to some extent carried on side by side (Scientific Meliorism, Ch.  XVII).  Ellen Key, also, advocates early marriage.  But she wisely adds that it involves the necessity for easy divorce.  That, indeed, is the only condition which can render early marriage generally desirable.  Young people—­unless they possess very simple and inert natures—­can neither foretell the course of their own development and their own strongest needs, nor estimate accurately the nature and quality of another personality.  A marriage formed at an early age very speedily ceases to be a marriage in anything but name.  Sometimes a young girl applies for a separation from her husband even on the very day after marriage.

The more or less permanent free unions formed among us in Europe are usually to be regarded merely as trial-marriages.  That is to say they are a precaution rendered desirable both by uncertainty as to either the harmony or the fruitfulness of union until actual experiment has been made, and by the practical impossibility of otherwise rectifying any mistake in consequence of the antiquated rigidity of most European divorce laws.  Such trial marriages are therefore demanded by prudence and caution, and as foresight increases with the development of civilization, and constantly grows among us, we may expect that there will be a parallel development in the frequency of trial marriage and in the social attitude towards such unions.  The only alternative—­that a radical reform in European marriage laws should render the divorce of a legal marriage as economical and as convenient as the divorce of a free marriage—­cannot yet be expected, for law always lags behind public opinion and public practice.

If, however, we take a wider historical view, we find that we are in presence of a phenomenon which, though favored by modern conditions, is very ancient and widespread, dating, so far as Europe is concerned, from the time when the Church first sought to impose ecclesiastical marriage, so that it is practically a continuation of the ancient European custom of private marriage.

Trial-marriages pass by imperceptible gradations into the group of courtship customs which, while allowing the young couple to spend the night together, in a position of more or less intimacy, exclude, as a rule, actual sexual intercourse.  Night-courtship flourishes in stable and well-knit European communities not liable to disorganization by contact with strangers.  It seems to be specially common in Teutonic and Celtic lands, and is known by various names, as Probenaechte, fensterln, Kiltgang, hand-fasting, bundling, sitting-up,