it be well understood that science pronounces that

LOVE IS A NECESSITY.

The single life is forced upon many of both sexes, in our present social
condition. Many choose it from motives of economy, from timidity, or as
a religious step, pleasing to God. The latter is a notion which probably
arose from a belief that, somehow, celibacy, strictly observed, means
chastity. It simply means continence. The chastest persons have been,
and are, not the virgins and celibates, but the married. When this truth
is known better, we shall have fewer sects and more religion.

We know women who refrain from marrying to keep out of trouble. The old
saying is, that every sigh drives a nail in one's coffin. They are not
going to worry themselves to death bearing children and nursing them! It
is too great a risk, too much suffering. How often have we been told
this! Yet how false the reasoning is! Very carefully prepared statistics
show that between the ages of twenty and forty-five years, more
unmarried women die than married, and few instances of remarkable
longevity in an old maid are known. The celebrated Dr. Hufeland,
therefore, in his treatise on the _Art_ _of Prolonging Life_, lays it
down as a rule, that to attain a great age, one must be married.

As for happiness, those who think they can best attain it outside the
gentle yoke of matrimony are quite as wide of the mark. Their selfish
and solitary pleasures do not gratify them. With all the resources of
clubs, billiard-rooms, saloons, narcotics, and stimulants, single men
make but a mock show of satisfaction. At heart every one of them envies
his married friends. How much more monotonous and more readily exhausted
are the resources of woman's single life! No matter what 'sphere' she is
in, no matter in what 'circle' she moves, no matter what 'mission' she
invents, it will soon pall on her. Would you see the result? We invoke
once more those dry volumes, full of lines and figures, on vital
statistics. Stupid as they look, they are full of the strangest stories;
and what is more, the stories are all true. Some of them are sad
stories, and this is one of the saddest: Of those unfortunates who, out
of despair and disgust of the world, jump from bridges, or take arsenic,
or hang themselves, or in other ways rush unbidden and unprepared before
the great Judge of all, _nearly two-thirds_ are unmarried, and in some
years nearly _three-fourths_. And of those other sad cases--dead, yet