In social life it is infinitely worse.  You, an electric unmarried man, enter a room full of attractive women.  How are you to know who is positive and who is negative, or who is a maiden lady in equilibrium, if it be true, as scientists affirm, that the genus old maid is one in whom the positive currents neutralize the negative currents?  Your affinity is perhaps the plainest woman in the room.  But beauty is a juggling sprite, entirely uncontrolled by electricity, and you are quite likely to make a mistake.  It is absurd the way we blunder on in a scientific age.  We touch a button, and are married.  The judge touches another button, and we are divorced.  If when we touched the first button it revealed us both negatives, we should start back in horror, for it is only before engagement that two negatives make an affirmative.  That is the reason that some clergymen refuse to marry a divorced woman; they see that she has made one electric mistake, and fear she will make another.  It is all very well for the officiating clergyman to ask the two intending to commit matrimony if they have a license from the town clerk, if they are of age or have the consent of parents, and have a million; but the vital point is omitted.  Are they electric affinities?  It should be the duty of the town-clerk, by a battery, or by some means to be discovered by electricians, to find out the galvanic habit of the parties, their prevailing electric condition.  Temporarily they may seem to be in harmony, and may deceive themselves into the belief that they are at opposite poles equidistant from the equator, and certain to meet on that imaginary line in matrimonial bliss.  Dreadful will be the awakening to an insipid life, if they find they both have the same sort of currents.  It is said that women change their minds and their dispositions, that men are fickle, and that both give way after marriage to natural inclinations that were suppressed while they were on the good behavior that the supposed necessity of getting married imposes.  This is so notoriously true that it ought to create a public panic.  But there is hope in the new light.  If we understand it, persons are born in a certain electrical condition, and substantially continue in it, however much they may apparently wobble about under the influence of infirm minds and acquired wickedness.  There are, of course, variations of the compass to be reckoned with, and the magnet may occasionally be bewitched by near and powerful attracting objects.  But, on the whole, the magnet remains the same, and it is probable that a person’s normal electric condition is the thing in him least liable to dangerous variation.  If this be true, the best basis for matrimony is the electric, and our social life would have fewer disappointments if men and women went about labeled with their scientifically ascertained electric qualities.

CAN A HUSBAND OPEN HIS WIFE’S LETTERS?