elf, the newspapers are to be
brought into requisition as a medium of advertising.

If so strange a doctrine as this were advocated by an obscure individual
in some secluded hamlet, or found only in the musty volumes of some
forgotten author, it surely would be unworthy of notice; but coming
as it does from a quite popular writer, and being coupled with a great
amount of really valuable truth, it is sufficiently important to
deserve refutation. A brief glance at the practical working of the
theory will be a sufficient exposure of its falsity.

According to this rule, a man or woman of large combativeness should
select a partner equally inclined to antagonism; then we should
have--what? the elements of a happy, contented, harmonious life? No;
instead, either a speedy lawsuit for divorce, or a continual domestic
broil, the nearest approach to a mundane purgatory possible. The
selfish, close-fisted, miserly money-catcher must marry a woman
equally sordid and stingy. Then together they could hoard up, for moths
and rust to destroy, or for interested relatives to quarrel over, the
pictorial greenback and the glittering dollar, each scrimping the other
down to the finest point above starvation and freezing, and finally
dying, to be forgotten as soon as dead by their fellow-men, and sent
among the goats at the great assizes. A shiftless spendthrift must
choose for a helpmeet (?) an equally slovenly, thriftless wife. A man
with a crotchet should select a partner with the same morbid fancy.
A man whose whole mental composition gravitates behind his ears, must
find a mate with the same animal disposition. An individual whose mental
organization is sadly unbalanced, is advised to seek for a wife a woman
with the same deficiencies and abnormalities.

Any one can see at a glance the domestic disasters which such a plan
of proceeding would entail. Men and women of unbalanced temperaments
would become more unbalanced. An individual of erroneous tendencies,
instead of having the constant check of the example and admonitions
of a mate of opposite tendencies, would be, by constant example,
hastened onward in his sinful ways. Thus, to all but a very small
proportion of humanity, the married state would be one of infelicity
and degeneration.

And what would be the progeny of such unions? The peculiarities and
propensities of the parents, instead of being modified and perhaps
obliterated in the children by corresponding differences in c