cians know further that if motherhood be begun
at a considerably later date, there is less local adaptability than when
the bones and ligaments are younger. The point lies in the date of the
beginning of motherhood, for this is in general a conspicuous instance
of the adage that the first step is the most costly.[13]

_Psychical Fitness for Marriage._--At the beginning of this chapter it
was insisted that we must carefully distinguish between physical or
physiological fitness for mating and complete fitness for
marriage--which, though it includes mating, is vastly more. Few will
question the proposition that physical fitness for marriage is reached
only some years after puberty; so complete psychical fitness for
marriage may well be later still. We should thus have a second
disharmony superposed upon the first. But, instead, when we look round
us, we may often be inclined to ask whether, for many girls and women,
the age of psychical fitness for marriage is ever reached at all; and we
have to ask ourselves how far this delay or indefinite postponement of
such fitness is due to natural conditions, or how far it is due to the
fact that we bring up our girls to be, for instance, sideboard
ornaments, as Ruskin said a generation ago.

I believe that this disparity between the age of physical fitness for
marriage and the attainment of that outlook upon life and its duties,
without which marriage must be so perilous, is one of the most important
practical problems of our time, and that its solution is to be found in
the principle of education for parenthood, which we have already
considered at such length. It is a most serious matter that marriage
should be delayed as it is beyond the best age for the commencement of
motherhood; it is injurious to the individual and her motherhood, and
whether delay occurs, as it does, disproportionately in different cases,
or disproportionately within a nation, in the different classes of which
it is composed, the consequences, as we have seen, are of the most
stupendous possible kind.

Yet observe what a difficulty we are faced with. Perceiving the
injurious consequences of delay in marriage--consequences which, as we
have seen, if considered only as they show themselves in the most
horrible department of pathology, would be sufficient to demand the most
urgent consideration--we may almost feel inclined to agree with the
utterly blind and deplorable doctrine too common amongst parents and