ly. Here were thousands of students of
both sexes, thinking of marriage, physically impelled toward marriage,
admitting that they wanted more information about marriage before
undertaking it. Add to these students the hundreds of thousands in other
colleges and to them the millions of young men and young women outside
of college--and there was Youth itself, visioning marriage as the Great
Adventure, which no one should miss, but about which there were grave
reports.

I have heard lots about Youth in recent years--its lackadaisical
attitude toward all serious things, its tendency to look the moral code
straight in the eye and smash it, its belief that chastity isn't worth
its cost or success in marriage worth working for. And I had disbelieved
much that I had heard, it having been my privilege to work with and for
young people in high school and college over a long period of years. I
knew that Youth is looking for something better than it is being given
in either precept or example. And so this request of a group of college
young people seemed to me to be both a challenge and an opportunity.

I accepted the challenge. The next step was to find out how best to meet
it. It seemed to me that to offer our young people anything less than
the best that I could get would be letting them down. So I turned for
advice to several college men who had made a long study of the problems
involved in marriage, and from the various lists of subjects and authors
suggested--adding a few of my own--selected the group now presented in
permanent form in this book. If these articles make success in marriage
seem something that must constantly be worked for, they at the same time
show that success, plus the happiness that goes with it, can be
achieved. Which is all, I think, that any man or woman has a right to
ask for.

WILLIAM F. BIGELOW

Helen Judy Bond

Foreword

If by some strange chance, not a vestige of us descended to the
remote future save a pile of our schoolbooks or some examination
papers, we may imagine how puzzled an antiquarian of the period
would be on finding in them no indication that the learners were
ever likely to be parents. "This must have been the curriculum for
their celibates," we may fancy him concluding. "I perceive here an
elaborate preparation for many things; especially for reading the
books of extinct nations and of coexisting nations (from which,
indeed