best method
for insuring a happy marriage?

At least, let us open our eyes to the fact that we are face to face with
some terrible problems with regard to the future of our girls. With safe
investments yielding less and less interest, it must become more and
more difficult to make a provision for the unmarried daughters; and if
the money is spent instead on training them to earn their own bread, we
are still met by the problem of the early superannuation of women's
labor, which rests on physical causes, and cannot therefore be removed.
This at least is no time to despise marriage, or for women of strong and
independent character to adopt an attitude which deprives the nation of
many of its noblest mothers.

But if we are to facilitate marriage, which must form, at any rate, the
main solution of the problems of the near future to which I have
alluded, if we are to prevent, or even lessen, the degradation of women,
if we are to extinguish this pit of destruction in our midst, into which
so many a fair and promising young life disappears, and which
perpetually threatens the moral and physical welfare of our own sons, if
we are to stay the seeds of moral decay in our own nation, we must be
content to revolutionize much in the order of our own life, and adopt a
lower and simpler standard of living. It is we, and not men, who set the
standard; it is we who have been guilty of the vulgar ambition of
following the last social fashion, and doing as our richer neighbors do,
until in England we have made our girls such expensive articles that
many young men simply dare not indulge in them, and are led to seek in
their luxurious clubs the comfort which they should find in a home of
their own, with all that relaxation of moral fibre which comes from club
life. Do we seriously think that we are likely successfully to contend
against the degradation of women by our Rescue Societies and our Refuges
when we are deliberately bringing about a social condition that
ministers to it? "Oh, of course," said a near relative of my own, "no
girl can marry comfortably and live in London with less than a thousand
a year." All I can answer is that if this be so, it means the
degradation of women writ large.

And have we even secured the happiness of our own daughters by this high
standard of living which prevents so many of them from marrying at all?
These unmarried girls, with no worthy object in life to call out the
noble energies that lie dorm