Might not a little advice be also profitable to man?  Is there not room for improvement in the stronger sex as well as in the weaker?  Reform in the one sex will be of little benefit unless there is reform in the other sex as well.  Our husbands and our fathers, too, need reforming, and that reform must begin very early in their lives, before yet they enter into marriage, before yet they enter upon the days of their courtship.  Our young men need curbing.  Youthful precocity must be checked. “Cito maturum cito putridum” says the Latin, “soon ripe, soon rotten.”  We allow our young men, some of them exceedingly young, too many liberties.  We allow them to sow too many wild oats.  If their intention is some day to take unto their care and keeping a woman’s life and happiness, to pluck from out a comfortable and contented home, and from the embrace of devoted parents, a pure and happy and trusting young woman, who has never felt the wrench and shock of life’s storms, nor the cold shoulder of neglect, nor the gnawing tooth of want, then let them see to it in time that they may bring to her a heart as pure and mind as uncorrupted, and character as unpolluted as they expect from her.

The law of heredity, of transmission of ancestral poison, is as operative in the male sex as in the female.  A pure and healthy offspring must be preceded by a pure and healthy parentage.  A rottening tree never produces luscious fruit.  “Like begets like.”  An enfeebled father means not only feebleness in the next generation, but also perpetuated misery and vice and crime.  Marriage is sacred and necessary and obligatory, but not all marriages are so.  There are some marriages from which woman should recoil as much as she would from death itself.  Rather that death would woo her than a man—­if I may be permitted to honor him with that name—­whose constitution is undermined, whose strength is sapped, and whose marrow and blood are poisoned.  Rather an old maid than a profligate’s nurse.  Rather a life of single blessedness than the housekeeper of a wreck of a husband.  Rather single and happy and stainless and conscience-free than a mother of an unfortunate offspring, that have the sins of their father visited upon them, and that shall one day curse their parents for having given existence to them.  Another remedy for unhappy marriages will be found in the cessation, of the anxiety on the part of so many parents to get their daughters married off.  It is but natural that this constant anxiety should make the daughter feel that she would like to lessen her parents’ dread, and cease being a trouble to them, especially when there are younger sisters crowding fast upon her, and so she says “Yes,” even when the word almost chokes in her throat, even though she knows in her heart that he is not her ideal, nor the man that will make her happy.  It is not true that any husband, who can support a wife, is better than no husband.  Marriage means more to a sensible woman than an alliance with a husband for the sake of being clothed and fed and housed.  She has a heart and soul and mind that have their wants, and if they be starved, unhappy marriage, if nothing worse, is the result.