hariot of the sun, and young women are to be
allowed to strip the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil, then it is
high time some system of education was invented which will put old
heads upon young shoulders. Alas, this can never be, for education
is a long and composite process, made up of home influences,
surrounding circumstances, and early associations. When books and
schools and teachers shall have done all they possibly can, high
above every Gamaliel will sit the good mother,--the first influence,
the first teacher, the first friend, and the last.

Unequal Marriages

If there is a mistake peculiarly fatal to a young man's or a girl's
future, it is that supreme act of social destruction called a
_mesalliance_. Indeed it is not measurable by any of the usual
conditions of life, and death itself would be a kindness compared with
the long misery of some kinds of _mesalliances_. They may arise from
inequalities of birth, differences in religious faith, or great
discrepancies in age; but whatever their occasion, they are always a
far-reaching and irretrievable mistake; the mistake _par excellence_
of any life.

An unequal marriage is not only the most fatal blunder of life, it is
also the most common one; and although it is not very easy for a man
to ruin himself with a single act, a foolish marriage will afford him
at least one decided way. In regard to men's _mesalliances_, they
cannot be said to be specially the temptation of youth. Foolish old
men who marry their cooks, and foolish young men who burden themselves
with some Casino divinity, keep up a very steady average. But the
young man's mistake is much the worst of the two; for he has his whole
life before him, and has probably made no provision against such a
social suicide.

If an old man marries beneath his station and culture, he believes he
is getting the wife he most desires; and if he is disappointed, he is
at any rate near the end of life, and he either has no children to
suffer from his folly, or they have already grown beyond its most
painful reach. But a young man who binds himself to a woman who is
every way beneath his own station, education, and professional
ambition, is in a different case. In a very short time the disillusion
of those senses begins under which he permitted mere physical beauty
to bind him; and he knows that, as far as his future progress is
concerned, he has put a millstone about his neck.

The effect of a social _me