The record-union., 1894-09-08
READY FOR BURIAL.


When the question was first thrown out
some years ago by merry parsgraphist
OF Boston, SIS marriage failuse?" no
one dreamed that it would cling to pub
Icity as it has. Here it is to-day repeated
more frequently than ever.
1t is silly question, in its very formu-
lation senseless witticism. We might
precisely as well ask if "business is
failure" if ''society is a failure" if 'life
is failure" if Happiness is failure?"
That the stupid inquiry still lives Is
probably because with it certain number
solace themselves, and salys their wounds
won IN unhappy marriage. By contem-
plating themselves, and imagining that
they I'LL the largest space in the expert
ence of human beings, they probably
take comfort in Illuminating over their
blunders, and in them finding an affirm
alive answer to the question that appears
so large to them.
For every one such there are hundreds,
y NSf EESAo6LAs w E4O AANS lOu1A 4l46 3
largest profit in the circle hallowed by
marriage and lawful parenthood. For
every one for whom the slRngy question
has so large a diameter, there are thou
sand lives whose chiefest joys have been
found in the love OF wife. husband and
child.
Now the fact is that marriage and do
mesticity are essentially secrets. There
is no Tree masonry quite so close as that
of marriage. We know ali about divorce,
we know all of severed marriage ties,
unhappy separated couples and broken
families. Nine-tenths of such things go
ofreeord somewhere; the busy and brassy
Paul Prys of the press keep US informed
of all the misery born of unhappiness.
But where is the record on the other side?
Written in hearts and engraved upon the
loves of lives insepsrable, intermingled,
and irrevOcably bound up in happy mar
riage.
Not that to these sorrows do not come,
not that there are not for them trials and
woes and cloudy and stormy days; ne,
there are plenty of these, and not one
marriage in twenty is forever trimming
of sllken sails upon placid seas. But
with all the woe, and sorrow, and trouble
to which life Is made heir by Adams
fall. there still remains greater satisfac-
tion, greater value and more of joy and
comfort and blessedness within than
without the marriage circle.
He has said well who declared that the
man not married is but half man, and
that woman unwed is but half developed.
No, marriage is not failure, not even as
business may be; its shore has its wrecks.
and it encounters rocks and shoals, but it
never wholly goes to pieces. The mating
instinct, if nothing else, remains to pre-
serve it, and the inclination to domesticity
is with as always to prove that marriage
is of our nature born.
It is an institution, and as such the fail
ure to gather joys by some of its member
ship no more proves it failure than does
the backsiding of some protesting prove
religion to be cheat. The institution of
marriage cannot fail; the most radical
socialism, the most alluring of commu-
nifty doctrines can give US nothing for it,
cannot substitute for it anything that
mankind will accept.
Where there is the form of marriage
without the essentials of sincerity, spirit
uality and abiding love, they who engage
in such travesty will find marriage 9
failure, and get what they bargained for.
But such are disqualified from answering
the question, lis marriage failure2"
They are competent to speak upon the
results of trifing with the sacred institu-
ton, but of nothing else.
1t is not creditable to magazine and
newspaper intelligence that the repetition
of the question we have considered should
be kept before the public gaze in print,
cartoon and cut. 1t is sadly battered,
sunburned and tattered, and our motion
is that what was stated in jest be now
inferred in solemn earnest and no more
be heard.