The Austin weekly statesman. (Austin, Tex.) 1883-1898, 1886-02-04
SENSATIONAL MARRIAGES.

SENSATIONAL MARRIAGES.
Sensational marriages are becoming
quite frequent of late in this country.
Marrying up in a balloon, or on horse
back, or across a stream, or by telegraph
has a charm for the light and giddy; and
sensational marriages in haste to repent
at leisure are darkening too many homes
in this land.
There are always adventurers enough in
every community that by some specious
pretext, family relationship, or peculiar
personal characteristics, to take advan-
tage of the sentimental and emotional
nature of weak and fanciful girls and de-
coy them into an unusual style of mar
riage, generally performed in haste and
deeply repented of at leisure, leisure of
days and nights of neglect, and finally of
abandonment.
There are several causes of this evil,
ity, and another, the general laxity and
looseness of our divorce laws.
The responsibility of selecting her own
husband is an inalienable right of every
woman, when she arrives at a proper ma
turity to entertain any such proposition.
Parents, like those in France, under our
ideas OF personal liberty, would be tyran-
nical indeed, who would force their daugh
tiers to marry men of parental selection.
Parental authority, used when girl is old
enough to marry, in dogmatic and dicta-
toral manner, is out of place and never to
be thought of. The authority over the
daughters of family ought to be used
while they are growing up, in such away
as to cultivate the minds and hearts of
these daughters up to a plane of judg-
ment and virtue, that would insure
a wise, independent selection of
husbands. Unless the parental
authority is used early in life to give
growing womanhood proper training
and proper respect for the judgment of
the parents it is too late when the matter
of personal choice of the girl comes to
be considered.
Our daughters should be reared to a
standard of high and fixed principles,
that would make it impossible for them at
maturity to contract mesalliance. They
should also have a sufficient respect for
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the parent to hold themselves aloof from
any association that might subject them
to the designs of worthless adventures,
and even if all this has been neglected in
their educational training, young women
ought to profit by the frequency of the
examples around them of sensational and
hasty marriages, turning out most I'M
happily for the victims.
There is no act of woman's life so
important as that of marriage. 1t either
fixes or undoes her happiness for life,
and it is the very last thing that should
be entered into inconsiderately or in
haste. 1t is unfortunately true that many
men, unworthy of the tenderness and
regard of good woman, are constantly
enticing good women into marriages that
result in the wreck of the happiness and
lives of those women. The quality of
goodness and purity in a woman from its
very nature partakes of the utmost trust
and confidence, and thus even our best
women are subject to such dangers.
Awoman of any individuality can control
her feelings, and she ought never to allow
her sympathies to be aroused for any man
unless her cool and thoughtful judgment
would sanction her choice of the man as
husband. No woman of proper self-re-
spect will allow herself to be interested in
a man, to the degree that would warrant
hope of marriage, until she had been def
nitely informed by the man that he was
seeking her in marriage, and a woman CT
this kind can never be taken in by an ad
venturer, ander the allurements of a sen
sational marriage. While marriage ought
to be animated by love, it is also matter
of business, for, however well woman may
love man, if it is evident the marriage
would result in unhappiness from any in
herent causes in the life of the man. she
ought not to marry him. Therefore, we
say it is a matter of business as well as
love- not the business of mere dollars and
cents, but the exercise of the judgment as
to compatibility and the eternal fitness of
things.
Another cause of hasty and emotional
marriages is the looseness and want of
sameness, through all the states. of our
| divorce laws; but this article is already too