[Illustration:  MARGARET JUNKIN PRESTON The South is justly proud of this poet of no mean rank who gave herself unstintedly to her home duties and responsibilities]

Physical attraction on one or both sides is undoubtedly the greatest force in marriage selection.  It is only when physical attraction exerts its influence upon a girl whose ideal of a husband is low or vague or incorrect that the danger is great.  Physical attraction is not love, but it may be—­often it is—­the basis of love when it exists between two who are suited to a life together.

Generally speaking, girls will find married life easier, and their husbands will find life more satisfactory, when the two have been reared with approximately the same ideals.  The girl who falls in love with a man largely because he is “different” from the boys among whom she has grown up often finds that very difference a stumbling block to domestic happiness.  Marriages across such chasms where there should be common ground are more hazardous than between those whose education, social training, friends, and beliefs are of the same type.  When they do succeed, they undoubtedly are the richer for the variety of experience husband and wife have to give each other; and, too, they show an adaptability on the part of one or both which argues well for continued happiness.  Commonly, however, they do not succeed.

There are, also, deeper matters than these to be considered.  Is this man or this woman worthy of lifelong devotion?  Is the love he offers or she offers in return for the love you offer, the love that gives or the love that merely takes?  Has he been a success at something, anything, that counts?  Has he a sense of responsibility in marriage and the burdens it brings?  Does he desire a home?  Do his views as to children reflect man’s natural desire to found a family or merely the selfish desire for the freedom and luxury which the absence of children may make possible?  Has he a right to approach fatherhood—­is his body physically and morally clean?

[Illustration:  Copyright by Underwood & Underwood COLONEL AND MRS. ROOSEVELT WITH MEMBERS OF THEIR FAMILY Colonel Roosevelt’s own family was preeminently one in which the father shared with the mother a keen sense of the responsibilities of marriage and the highest ideals of home life]

These are serious questions with which to weight the wings of a young man’s or a young woman’s fancy.  But the attraction which cannot stand before them is not safe as a basis for marriage.  Many a young man or woman has willfully turned closed eyes to the selfishness or the irresponsibility which will later wreck a home, because attraction blinded common sense.

Barter, the lowest form of marriage, exists and has always existed whenever the material benefits that either husband or wife expects to derive from the connection are the impelling forces in the union.  The woman desires wealth, social position, a title—­or perhaps nothing more than security from poverty or the necessity of work outside the home, or perhaps no more than the mere security of a home itself.  The man in other cases desires wealth, or social position, or a wife who will grace his fine home, or some business connection which the marriage will afford.  And upon these things men and women build, or attempt to build, the foundations of home life.