It is a good deal more important that the institution of the American home shall not decay, than that the Panama Canal be built or our foreign trade increase.  So, in considering the young man and the new home, we are dealing with an immediate and permanent and an absolutely vital question, not only from the view-point of the young man himself, but from that of the Nation as well.

Of course nobody means that young men should hurl themselves into matrimony.  The fact that it is advisable for you to learn to swim does not mean that you should jump into the first stream you come to, with your clothes and shoes on.  Undoubtedly you ought first to get “settled”; that is, you ought to prepare for what you are going to do in life and begin the doing of it.  Don’t take this step while you are in college.  If you mean to be a lawyer, you ought to get your legal education and open your office; if a business man, you should “get started”; if an artizan, you should acquire your trade, etc.  But it is inadvisable to wait longer.

It is not necessary for you to “build up a practise” in the profession, or make a lot of money in business, or secure unusual wages as a skilled laborer.  Begin at the beginning, and live your lives together, win your successes together, share your hardships together, and let your fortune, good or ill, be of your joint making.  It will help you, too, in a business way.

Everybody else is, or was, situated nearly as you are, and there is a sort of fellow-feeling in the hearts of other men and women who once had to “hoe the same row” you are hoeing; and it is among these men and women you must win your success.  It is largely through their favor and confidence that you will get on at all.  If you are making a new home you are in harmony with the world about you, and the very earth itself exhales a vital and sustaining sympathy.

It is not at all necessary that you should be able to provide as good a house and the furnishings thereof as that from which your wife comes.  Nobody expects you to be as successful in the very beginning of your life as her father was at the close of his.  Least of all does she herself expect it.  And even if this were possible, it is not from such continuous luxury that the best character is made.  The absolute necessity to economize compels the ordinary young American couple to learn the value of things—­the value of a dollar and the value of life.

They learn to “know how it comes,” again to employ one of the wise sayings of the common people.  And the numberless experiences of their first few years of comparative hardship are the very things necessary to bring out in them sweetness, self-sacrifice, and uplifting hardihood of character.  In these sharp experiences, too, there is greatest happiness.  How many hundreds of times have you heard men and women say of their early married years, “Those were the happiest days of my life.”

As a matter of good business on the one hand, and of sheer felicity on the other hand, make the ideals of this new home of yours as high as you possibly can.  Don’t make them so high that neither you nor any other human being can live up to them, of course; but if you can put them a notch beyond those even of the exalted standard of the old home, by all means do it.  Do it, that is, if you can live up to them.