ducation where the parents learn more than they
teach--shall be (let us use the expressive Yankee idiom) _shirked_.

It is a curious fact that, in those countries where this system of
marriages is the general rule, there is no word corresponding to our
English word "home." In many polite languages of Europe it would be
impossible neatly to translate the sentiment with which we began this
essay, that a man's house is not always his home.

Let any one try to render the song, "Sweet Home," into French, and one
finds how Anglo-Saxon is the very genius of the word. The structure of
life, in all its relations, in countries where marriages are matter of
arrangement and not of love, excludes the idea of home.

How does life run in such countries? The girl is recalled from her
convent or boarding-school, and told that her father has found a
husband for her. No objection on her part is contemplated or provided
for; none generally occurs, for the child is only too happy to obtain
the fine clothes and the liberty which she has been taught come only
with marriage. Be the man handsome or homely, interesting or stupid,
still he brings these.

How intolerable such a marriage! we say, with the close intimacies of
Anglo-Saxon life in our minds. They are not intolerable, because they
are provided for by arrangements which make it possible for each to go
his or her several way, seeing very little of the other. The son or
daughter, which in due time makes its appearance in this menage, is
sent out to nurse in infancy, sent to boarding-school in youth, and in
maturity portioned and married, to repeat the same process for another
generation. Meanwhile father and mother keep a quiet establishment and
pursue their several pleasures. Such is the system.

Houses built for this kind of life become mere sets of reception-rooms,
such as are the greater proportion of apartments to let in Paris,
where a hearty English or American family, with their children about
them, could scarcely find room to establish themselves. Individual
character, it is true, does something to modify this programme.
There are charming homes in France and Italy, where warm and noble
natures, thrown together perhaps by accident, or mated by wise
paternal choice, infuse warmth into the coldness of the system under
which they live. There are in all states of society some of such
domesticity of nature that they will create a home around themselves
under any circumstances, how