gst men
and women against a burden too grievous to be borne? Does not the
fiction of the day represent a tendency to allow an increased laxity in
the interpretation of the matrimonial contract? And where there is
smoke there is fire. What novelists write other people are thinking.
Has the time come to reconsider our position with regard to marriage
and the permanent obligations hitherto associated with it?

We answer decisively, No. It is not the institution which is at fault,
but the individuals who embrace it. We spoke of marriage as Nature's
great sacrament, and so it is. And as with "the Lord's Supper" the
unworthy participant is said to "eat and drink only condemnation to
himself," so is it with they who draw near to Nature's banquet and
attempt, unprepared, to partake of the deepest joys of life. Their
profanity smites them with a curse. We hold up our hands in no
Pharisaic spirit of holy horror, but we ask the men and women of this
generation and of those classes from which these mutterings and
threatenings of revolt mainly emanate--we ask them, whether marriage,
as they understand the term, can be other than a bloodless martyrdom?
If that individual who gave her name to a novel two or three seasons
ago, if the young woman known as _Dodo_ be a type--and it was noted by
the critics of the time that such was the character of the fashionable
young _mondaine_ of the day, greedy for nothing but excitement and
sensuous existence, incapable of serious thought, rebellious against, I
will not say the restraints, but even the _convenances_ of civilised
life, with no pretension to anything remotely resembling character or
moral earnestness, a wild, gay, frittering, helpless creature, whom it
were blasphemy to think of in the same day with noble womanhood as we
all have known it--if _that_, I say, is the type of the young
_mondaine_ of the hour, then I have no doubt they will give the
novelists and playwrights plenty of employment in describing their
self-imposed torments, the insufferable bondage to which they are
subjected. But does any one propose to alter the moral law for them?
If mothers in modern Babylon are ready to labour day and night in
attempting to catch as husbands for their daughters men in whom one and
one only qualification is asked, namely, that of wealth, then their
perdition be upon their own heads and on those of the luckless pair who
are literally speaking "crucified on a cross of gold". If gi