social levels that
are so different as to entail great differences of manners and habits.
Other and minor disparities of circumstances between girl life and
married life will have their effect, but they are less strong and less
invariable. Some of the happiest marriages have been marriages of
emancipation, which removed a girl from uncongenial family surroundings,
and placed her for the first time in an intellectual and moral
atmosphere in which she could freely breathe. At the same time, in the
choice of a wife, the character, circumstances, habits, and tone of the
family in which she has been brought up will always be an important
element. There are qualities of race, there are pedigrees of character,
which it is never prudent to neglect. Franklin quotes with approval the
advice of a wise man to choose a wife 'out of a bunch,' as girls brought
up together improve each other by emulation, learn mutual self-sacrifice
and forbearance, rub off their angularities, and are not suffered to
develop overweening self-conceit. A family where the ruling taste is
vulgar, where the standard of honour is low, where extravagance and
self-indulgence and want of order habitually prevail, creates an
atmosphere which it needs a strong character altogether to escape. There
is also the great question of physical health. A man should seek in
marriage rather to raise than to depress the physical level of his
family, and above all not to introduce into it grave, well-ascertained
hereditary disease. Of all forms of self-sacrifice hardly any is at once
so plainly right and so plainly useful as the celibacy of those who are
tainted with such disease.

There is no subject on which religious teachers have dwelt more than
upon marriage and the relation of the sexes, and it has been continually
urged that the propagation of children is its first end. It is strange,
however, to observe how almost absolutely in the popular ethics of
Christendom such considerations as that which I have last mentioned have
been neglected. If one of the most responsible things that a man can do
is to bring a human being into the world, one of his first and most
obvious duties is to do what he can to secure that it shall come into
the world with a sound body and a sane mind. This is the best
inheritance that parents can leave their children, and it is in a large
degree within their reach. Immature marriage, excessive child-bearing,
marriages of near relations, and, above