of law, the more cool and
cunning will excite hopes, which deferred will make sick the heart, and
inspire an affection which may exist but to torment the heart in which it
had its birth. Ay, beneath such mental grief the beauty and blessedness
of life may vanish, never to return, and yet all the while he who did the
deed may defy the power of human law.

Some letters which have recently appeared in the _Manchester Examiner_
may be taken as evidence that these breach of promise cases interfere
very materially with marriages. In the immediate neighbourhood of
Manchester the question, Why don't the men propose? appears to have
excited considerable interest. In that busy region men fall in love and
get married, and have families, and are gathered to their fathers, just
as do the rest of her Majesty's subjects in other parts of the United
Kingdom. But it seems the Lancashire witches are many of them still on
their parent's hands. Paterfamilias gets anxious. Deeply revolving the
question under the signature of "A Family Man," he sends the following
letter to the Editor of the journal alluded to--

"Sir, Your cosmopolitan journal," he writes to the Editor, "must have
many readers interested in the question 'Why don't the men propose?' It
would be dangerous to say I have found the entire solution to this
enigma, for fear of disclosing a mare's nest; but I will warrant that one
of the most powerful causes of the shyness of men in matters matrimonial,
is the frequency of breach of promise prosecutions. A lady may be quite
justified in prosecuting the man who has deceived her, but is she wise in
doing so? Or if acting wisely for herself, does she not lower the
character of her sex? Men think so, depend upon it. Your wavering,
undecided, fastidious bachelor is a great newspaper reader, and devours
breach of promise cases, and after reading that Miss Tepkins has obtained
so many hundred pounds' damages against Mr. Topkins,
soliloquises:--'Humph! It seems, then, that the best salve for a wounded
heart is gold. Bah! women only marry for a home. It is clear the woman
is the only gainer, else why estimate her disappointment at so many
hundred pounds? She gives a man nothing for his promise to marry but her
heart (if that), and how much is _it_ worth? What recompense can he get
from her should she steal back the heart she professes to have given him!
I'll take jolly good care I never make a promise of marriage to a woman