ulating companionship is substituted for (what he might
otherwise have been obliged to seek) the society of his equals in
powers and his fellows in the higher pursuits. We see, accordingly,
that young men of the greatest promise generally cease to improve as
soon as they marry, and, not improving, inevitably degenerate. If the
wife does not push the husband forward, she always holds him back. He
ceases to care for what she does not care for; he no longer desires,
and ends by disliking and shunning, society congenial to his former
aspirations, and which would now shame his falling-off from them; his
higher faculties both of mind and heart cease to be called into
activity. And this change coinciding with the new and selfish
interests which are created by the family, after a few years he
differs in no material respect from those who have never had wishes
for anything but the common vanities and the common pecuniary
objects.

What marriage may be in the case of two persons of cultivated
faculties, identical in opinions and purposes, between whom there
exists that best kind of equality, similarity of powers and
capacities with reciprocal superiority in them--so that each can
enjoy the luxury of looking up to the other, and can have alternately
the pleasure of leading and of being led in the path of
development--I will not attempt to describe. To those who can
conceive it, there is no need; to those who cannot, it would appear
the dream of an enthusiast. But I maintain, with the profoundest
conviction, that this, and this only, is the ideal of marriage; and
that all opinions, customs, and institutions which favour any other
notion of it, or turn the conceptions and aspirations connected with
it into any other direction, by whatever pretences they may be
coloured, are relics of primitive barbarism. The moral regeneration
of mankind will only really commence, when the most fundamental of
the social relations is placed under the rule of equal justice, and
when human beings learn to cultivate their strongest sympathy with an
equal in rights and in cultivation.

Thus far, the benefits which it has appeared that the world would
gain by ceasing to make sex a disqualification for privileges and a
badge of subjection, are social rather than individual; consisting in
an increase of the general fund of thinking and acting power, and an
improvement in the general conditions of the association of men with
women. But it would be a griev