desirable for all women, nor even for a
majority. But I still think that this state of union is the most
natural, beneficent, satisfying condition possible for all of both
sexes--the condition most conducive to the highest, widest, happiest
development of the individual man or woman, especially the latter, for
it is through marriage only, through the beautiful and sacred wifehood
and motherhood which that institution guarantees in purity and holiness,
that woman's highest nature finds scope and opportunity. And I make no
exceptions. On the contrary, I should say that the exceptions which
might occur should invariably be counted as misfortunes. Not that many
good, true, noble women do not live and die unmarried. _Circumstances_,
that inflexible arbiter of human life, as it often seems, may strangely
turn into wide and unaccustomed channels the love, the devotion, the
energy, the self-sacrifice, that, in their pure, strong action, make
woman's best development, and so the world, the needy people of the
world, humanity at large, may receive the immediate benediction of it.
Let no woman who, alone it may be, goes steadfastly on her way of duty
and self-abnegation, think she has lived in vain because the special lot
of woman has been denied her. If not happiness, which comes from content
and satisfaction, yet there is something higher, diviner still, arising
from duty done and trials endured--blessedness. But such exceptions do
not, I conceive, invalidate the general fact that marriage was intended
to be the channel for the vast aggregate of human happiness and
improvement. I speak of marriage as it should be, as it might be, as it
will one day be, when men and women have acquainted themselves with the
laws, physical and spiritual, which were intended to adjust these unions
between the sexes in a harmonious manner, according to natural
sympathies and affinities; laws, infallible, inherent in the individual
constitution, and which, if understood and enforced, would obviate much
of the sin, misfortune, and misery in the earth. It is a great and
curious question, how much of the pain, suffering, and evil so rife
among men, is due to the one-sided, blindfold, inconsiderate, and
unsuitable marriages every day taking place; filling the homes of the
land with discontent, bickerings, disorder, and continual strife, from
the jostling together of antipathetic elements; cursing society with the
influences derived from character formed a