be
dedicated to the future, and thereby compromising the worth or the
possibility of any future at all.

In the light of these considerations and many more, some of which we
shall later consider, I deplore and protest against with all my heart,
as blind, ignorant, and destructive, the counsel of those women, some of
them conspicuous advocates of the cause of woman's suffrage--in which I
nevertheless believe--who advise women to delay in marriage, or who
publish opinions throwing contempt upon marriage altogether. Later, we
must deal in detail with marriage; here we are only concerned with the
marriage age. It will then be argued that the conditions of marriage
must sooner or later be modified in so far as they are at present
inacceptable to a certain number of women of the highest type. This may
be granted without in any degree accepting the deplorable teaching of
such writers as Miss Cicely Hamilton, in her book entitled "Marriage as
a Trade." Every individual case requires individual consideration, and
no less than any individual case ever yet received. But in general those
women who counsel the delay of the marriage age are opposing the facts
of feminine development and psychology. They are indirectly encouraging
male immorality and female prostitution, with their appalling
consequences for those directly concerned, for hosts of absolutely
innocent women, and for the unborn. Further, those who suppose that the
granting of the vote is going to effect radical and fundamental changes
in the facts of biology, the development of instinct, and its
significance in human action, are fools of the very blindest kind. Some
of us find that it needs constant self-chastening and bracing up of the
judgment to retain our belief in the cause of woman's suffrage, of the
justice and desirability of which we are convinced, assaulted as we
almost daily are by the unnatural, unfeminine, almost inhuman blindness
of many of its advocates.

We have constantly to remind ourselves that our immediate concern and
duty are not with the world as it might be, or ought to be, or will be,
but with the world as it is. There are many good arguments, admirably
adapted to an imaginary world, why the marriage age should be increased.
But these forget the possible, nay the inevitable, consequences, if such
an increase show itself in one nation and not in another, in one class
of society and not in another. It is a good thing, and it is the ideal
of the e