inasmuch as there is
not one law of association for the rich and another for the poor, this
view spreads, until even rich men consider whether it is not possible to
secure the luxuries without the wife.

Now, since marriage is, on the whole, an institution with which society
cannot very well dispense--at any rate not until some good substitute
has been found for it--it is clear that rich men ought not to be allowed
to treat it in this way. If modern civilization tends to beget a
disinclination to marry, it ought also, on the principle of
compensation, to provide some means for counteracting this tendency, or
keeping it under control. Is the increase of husband-hunting--we ask the
question in a respectful and, we trust, purely philosophical spirit of
inquiry--calculated to supply this great and obvious want? What are its
merits, in this respect, as compared with the old-fashioned theory that
woman should be wooed, not woo? Even the most inveterate hater of
husband-hunting must admit that, so far as the great end of matrimony is
concerned, the two sexes nowadays stand to each other in a most
unnatural relation. It is alike the mission of both to marry, but
whereas women are honorably anxious to fulfill this mission, men, as we
have already seen, are too ready to shirk it. Yet, by a strange
inversion of the usual order of things, to the very sex which evades the
mission is its furtherance and chief control entrusted.

Besides, not only does woman take more kindly to the duty of matrimony
than man--or at least nineteenth-century man--but she has comparatively
nothing else to think about. A dozen occupations are open to him, but
her one object in life, her whole being's end and aim, is to marry.
Surely, if the art of marriage requires cultivation, it ought, like
everything else, to be entrusted to those who can give their whole time
to it, not to those who have so much else to do. Even when a bachelor is
in a position to marry, and not unwilling to make the experiment, he is
still far less fitted for the furtherance of matrimony than a woman. He,
perhaps, meets a nice girl at a ball, is taken with her, and after a
mild flirtation thinks, as he walks home in the moonlight, that she
would make a charming wife. He dreams about her, and next morning at
breakfast, as he pensively eats a pound of steak, resolves that on the
same afternoon, or the next at the very latest, he will contrive an
accidental meeting, or even find some