e, their circumstances rendering it, as they rightly
considered, unjustifiable in them to think of marriage, each of them
simply and happily, aided and cheered by the other's love, discharged
the duties of their own separate positions in life.

122. In the nature of things, instances of this kind of noble life
remain more or less concealed, (while imprudence and error proclaim
themselves by misfortune,) but they are assuredly not unfrequent in
our English homes. Let us next observe the political and national
result of these arrangements. You leave your marriages to be settled
by "supply and demand," instead of wholesome law. And thus, among your
youths and maidens, the improvident, incontinent, selfish, and foolish
ones marry, whether you will or not; and beget families of children
necessarily inheritors in a great degree of these parental
dispositions; and for whom, supposing they had the best dispositions
in the world, you have thus provided, by way of educators, the
foolishest fathers and mothers you could find; (the only rational
sentence in their letters, usually, is the invariable one, in which
they declare themselves "incapable of providing for their children's
education"). On the other hand, whosoever is wise, patient, unselfish,
and pure among your youth, you keep maid or bachelor; wasting their
best days of natural life in painful sacrifice, forbidding them their
best help and best reward, and carefully excluding their prudence and
tenderness from any offices of parental duty.

Is not this a beatific and beautifully sagacious system for a
Celestial Empire, such as that of these British Isles?

123. I will not here enter into any statement of the physical laws
which it is the province of our physicians to explain; and which are
indeed at last so far beginning to be understood, that there is hope
of the nation's giving some of the attention to the conditions
affecting the race of man, which it has hitherto bestowed only on
those which may better its races of cattle.

It is enough, I think, to say here that the beginning of all sanitary
and moral law is in the regulation of marriage, and that, ugly and
fatal as is every form and agency of license, no licentiousness is so
mortal as licentiousness in marriage.

124. Briefly, then, and in main points, subject in minor ones to such
modifications in detail as local circumstances and characters would
render expedient, those following are laws such as a prudent nat