On the whole, however, even with such drawbacks as the above, the social relationship of the sexes in the United States is one of the many points in which the new surpasses the old.  The American girl is thrown into such free and ample relations with the American boy from her earliest youth up that she is very apt to look upon him simply as a girl of a stronger growth.  Some such word as the German Geschwister is needed to embrace the “young creatures” who, in petticoats or trousers, form the genuine democracy of American youth.  Up to the doors of college, and often even beyond them, the boy and girl have been “co-educated;” at the high school the boy has probably had a woman for his teacher, at least in some branches, up to his sixteenth or seventeenth year.  The hours of recreation are often spent in pastimes in which girls may share.  In some of the most characteristic of American amusements, such as the “coasting” of winter, girls take a prominent place.  There is no effort on the part of elders to play the spy on the meetings of boy or girl, or to place obstacles in their way.  They are not thought of as opposite sexes; it is “just all the young people together.”  The result is a spirit of absolute good comradeship.  There is little atmosphere of the unknown or the mysterious about the opposite sex.  The love that leads to marriage is thus apt to be the product of a wider experience, and to be based on a more intimate knowledge.  The sentimental may cry fie on so clear-sighted a Cupid, but the sensible cannot but rejoice over anything that tends to the undoing of the phrase “lottery of marriage.”

That the ideal attitude towards and in marriage has been attained in average American society I should be the last to assert.  The way in which American wives leave their husbands toiling in the sweltering city while they themselves fleet the time in Europe would alone give me pause.  But I am here concerned with the relative and not the absolute; and my contention is that the average marriage in America is apt to be made under conditions which, compared with those of other nations, increase the chances of happiness.  A great deal has been said and written about the inconsistency of the marriage laws of the different States, and much cheap wit has been fired off at the fatal facility of divorce in the United States; but I could not ascertain from my own observation that these defects touched any very great proportion of the population, or played any larger part in American society, as I have defined it, than the differences between the marriage laws of England and Scotland do in our own island.  M. Bourget, quite arbitrarily and (I think) with a trace of the proverbial Gallic way of looking at the relations of the sexes, has attributed the admitted moral purity of the atmosphere of American society to the coldness of the American temperament and the sera juvenum Venus.  It seems to me, however, that there is no call to disparage American virtue