I quoted at the start:  “Not one-half of our marriages have unbiased love as a foundation on both sides. (The love is usually on the man’s side.) A woman marries for money, position, spite, pride, contrariness, fear of being an old maid, or for a home which she thinks will afford her more pleasure than the one she leaves.  Love is the last thing to enter her head, and never her heart.  Men of real sound judgment in business throw this judgment entirely aside when they come to select a wife.  A man might better remain single than marry with the chances nine out of ten in favor of his making a mistake for life.”

SEE HOW LITTLE KNOWLEDGE

of anybody’s good points this gentleman displays.  The young woman who has worked at ironing in the forenoon until her feet were swollen and her head has got dizzy, comes into the parlor in the evening, all frills and tucks, all “highty-tighty,” all full of fun and God’s good humor, and impresses my friend with the belief that she has never done an honest hour’s labor in her life!  Pshaw! she has got more pluck, and nerve, and “sand,” than half a dozen men, when it comes to where the need is!  She is going to be

THE MOTHER OF AN AMERICAN,

and Americans are not noted for their servility, their laziness, their mediocrity, or their lack of brains!  For shame, then to judge a young woman as she appears to you when she is anxious to get rid of you!  How would you like to be judged solely at those times when you were “carrying on,” and “didn’t care whether school kept or not”?  That is precisely the way this gentleman has spoken of young women a page back.  He thinks they love no one because they have never loved him!  He never loved them, and how could he expect them to be swindled?  Read his remarks over again, and see how events themselves deny his correctness.

HOW MANY HUSBANDS HAS HE SEEN

follow a drunken wife into a gutter?  And, on the contrary, has he not seen the reverse of this sad picture many a time?  I heard a Judge say to a poor woman once,—­she was all scars:  “I would send this woman-beater to the work-house for two hundred days if I did not know you would starve yourself to pay his way out.”  And then the poor, foolish, faithful heart appealed to his Honor to “spare the man, just once more;” she was sure he was a little the worse for drink when he misused her.  What does our friend call this thing in woman, if it be not love?  The being capable of a wife’s love, and a mother’s love, and a sister’s love, is not much in danger of the criticisms of a man who has only a front-porch knowledge of all her sex!

SICKNESS.