The Best Age for Marriage.—­ The reproductive life begins with puberty, but maturity is not reached before the age of twenty-one.  It is only then that the standard of development is reached that is most compatible with the successful bearing of the grave responsibilities of wifehood and motherhood.  The too early exercise of the reproductive functions leads to increased suffering on the part of the mother, depresses her vitality, and increases her liability to disease.  Statistics show that the mortality is very much greater where girls marry under twenty years of age.

The offspring are apt to be small and ill developed, and die in large numbers in early life; only a small percentage live long and robust lives.  In France it has been observed that where the fear of conscription has caused many young people to marry the offspring were lacking in vigor.  Among the offspring of immature parents there is a larger proportion of idiots, cripples, criminals, scrofulous, insane, and tubercular than among the children of nubile parents.

In our climate women are best fitted to become wives and mothers between the ages of twenty-four and twenty-eight years.  Before this age neither their self-knowledge, their knowledge of the world, nor their experience is sufficiently mature to fit them to wisely make the choice of a companion for life, or to become mothers.  After forty, most women cannot hope for children.  Men had better wait until between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty years, before they undertake the responsibilities of parenthood.

Shall Cousins Marry?—­ They might if both families were perfectly healthy; but as few families are without some lurking predisposition to disease, it is not well, as a rule, to run the risk of developing this by too repeated unions.

Contraindications to Marriage.—­ Young women in whose family there is a distinct history of such hereditary diseases as cancer, tuberculosis, or insanity for two generations back, should not marry at all.  Not only is this a fearful legacy to hand down to their children, but pregnancy and child-bearing very decidedly favor the development of these diseases.

Syphilis in either sex is a distinct bar to marriage; first, the party married is sure to contract the disease, even though it may have been supposed to have been cured.  Fortunately, the children of such marriages are generally still-born; still, they do sometimes live, and are most pitiable and sickly objects.  For any one to marry under these conditions is a crime against society, against the State, and against posterity.

Women who have serious forms of heart disease, tuberculosis, or Bright’s disease would, by becoming pregnant, run a serious risk of losing their lives toward the close of the pregnancy or at the time of their confinement.  In case of heart disease, the pulmonary congestion that accompanies pregnancy, together with the encroachment of the pregnant uterus on the cavity of the chest, would greatly add to the embarrassment of the heart’s action.