t all shall do so at the right age, and shall join themselves
for life with rightly chosen men.

One more point may be conveniently considered here, though it is not
strictly a matter of the marriage age for girls. The point is as to the
most generally desirable age relation between husband and wife. Here,
again, we must remind ourselves that it is impossible to lay down the
law for any case, and that that is not what we are now attempting to do.

As every one knows, there is an average disparity of some few years in
the ages of husband and wife. This may be referred probably to economic
conditions in part, and also to the fact that girlhood becomes womanhood
at a somewhat earlier age than boyhood becomes manhood. The girl is more
precocious. Thus though she be twenty and her husband twenty-three, she
is as mature.

It is probable that the economic tendencies of the day are in the
direction of increasing this disparity, since more is demanded of the
man in the material sense, and he therefore must delay. Some authorities
consider that seniority of six or eight years on the part of the husband
constitutes the desirable average. But there are considerations commonly
ignored that should qualify this opinion in my judgment.

It is not that science has any information regarding the consequence
upon the sex or quality of offspring of any one age ratio in marriage
rather than another. On subjects like this wild statements are
incessantly being made, and we are often told that certain consequences
in offspring follow when the husband is older than the wife, and others
when he is younger, and so forth. As to this, nothing is known, and it
is improbable that there is anything to know. But it has usually been
forgotten, so far as I am aware, that the disparity of age has a very
marked and real consequence, which is, in its turn, the cause of many
more consequences.

We have seen that the male death-rate is higher than the female
death-rate. At all ages, whether before birth or after it, the male
expectation of life is less than the female. This is more conspicuously
true than ever now that the work of Lord Lister, based upon that of
Pasteur, has so enormously lowered the mortality in childbirth. Even
now that mortality is falling, and will rapidly fall for some time to
come, still further increasing the female advantage in expectation of
life; the more especially this applies to married women. If now, this
being the natural f