y which has existed since
the beginning of time but which every postponement of the age of
marriage causes to increase in relative numbers and to gain new
strength for poisoning the blood of life.

Love, denied at the front door, flies in by the cellar window. Angel
or bat, it is always with us. Our only choice is between its guises.

Mary looked at the army of women celibates in offices and in stores
and in their apartments and in their boarding houses, women celibates
five and ten and fifteen and twenty years into the period when nature
has by irrepealable edict ordained love. It was surely unnatural, for
the mass of them. They were not vowed nuns. They were not devoted to
any great cause. They were just ordinary, normal young women,
thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of them.

Then, on the other side, Mary looked at the great army of women in
the midnight restaurants, in the streets, in their segregated
quarters--women who, however they may be sentimentalized about and
however irresponsible they may be for their own condition, are, as
a matter of fact, ignorant, stupid, silly, and dirty. Yet on them
was squandered the emotional life of millions of young men.

On the one side--intelligent, capable, effective young women, leading
lives of emotional sterility. On the other side--inferior women
blasted and withered by their specialization in the emotional life of
youth!

The connection between postponement of marriage and irregularity of
living will be admitted by everybody who is willing to face facts and
who is optimist enough to believe that if, instead of letting facts
sleep, we rouse them and fight them we can make a better race.

The great Russian scientist, Metchnikoff, successor to Pasteur in the
Pasteur Institute, mentions the postponement of marriage as one of the
biological disharmonies of life. It is a disharmony that "among highly
civilized peoples marriage and _regular_ unions are impossible at the
_right time_."

And Mr. A. S. Johnson, writing in the authoritative report of the
committee of fifteen on the social evil, notes the parallel increase
of "young unmarried men" and of a city's "volume of vice."

He goes on to make, without comment, a statement of the economic facts
of the case.

"As a rule," he says, "the income which a young man earns, while
sufficient to secure a fair degree of comfort for himself, does not
suffice for founding a family."

He cannot found a family a