The Worcester spy. [volume] (Worcester, Mass.) 1898-1904, 1898-12-25

blame with it. Briefly, it is. one thing
to fall in lOYe-to be, let us say, very
much in love; another to think that il
is not only a pleasant but Il VirtuOus
act. AS matter of fact, it is a very
commonplace, a very natural one. In
many cases such love may prove quite
a safe guide but it is not d virtue tC
yield obedience to the instinct, as if il
were the voice of Cod
Yet that it is SO, is the teaching which
nine-tenths of us almost give to the
girls. Nay, mOrei 1t is the universal
teaching to both sexes on this point
Take up the most sentimental fiction
of The English school, or the most real
istic of the French, and you will find
them alike in this underlying assump-
ton of sex for sex is something praise
worthy.
The drama, in BOTH begins on the old
classical lines; youth, propinquity, an
all absorbing selfishness, a mental and
bodily exaltation which is intoxicating
as wine. Now, if this is so, the wrong
if wrong there be-must be in the end
which differentiates the two similar be-
ginninss,
But if the end in both be a purely
personal qualification, it is hard to see
why one should be blessed and the
other cursed utterly. Still harder it is
say, as advocates of ''all for love and
the world well lost theory do say, that
you may seek the happiness of personal
self qualification through the mind, but
not through the body; through the SEN
sual pleasures which can be bought by
love, and not through those which are
to be bought by money. The distlnc-
ton is a purely arbitrary one.
Women have not so learned their
rio la he 81,
those eastern lands with which l am
best acquainted. There, hidden under
thousand blemishes, a million abuses,
still fingers the great truth--sO unpal-
atable to our western indiVidualism-
that man and woman stand related,
not to each other, but to the immortal
ty which comes to the world through
the generations on generations of men
and women who are born into it.
There, nowadays, when error has OBJ
scured so much, marriage is not a pure
ly personal matter, as it is with US, it
is a duty to the race.
I am not, however, going to advocate
the Indian system here with child
marriage, female infanticide and sati
thrown in as make-Weights), though
my personal experience is that even
with polygamy superadded, the percent
age of rational happiness derived from
WlIenOOQ ana mOJnGfA0OQ IS as nlSn
in India as it is in England.
what is marriage?" asks Marie
Corelli; then answers the question by
saying that it is the taking of a vow
before the throne which declares that
the man and woman concerned have
each discovered in each other his or her
true mate-that all the world is a mere
grain of dust in worth as compared
with the exalted passion which fills
their souls and moves them to become
one in flesh as well as one in spirit,
Lady Jeune again gives it as her opin-
ion that with a pure and single-minded
English girl nothing has any chance
in competition with the glamor and
ecstasy of q pure, genuine passion"
These are no uncertain utterances.
They point unerringly to the thesis that
this personal emotion-call II what you
willis IN itself sufficient to warrant
entering into a lifelong contract into
which, to say the least of it, many
other considerations should enter; a
thesis which is largely responsible for
making the standard of social morality
in the west so low.
For it is low. Whatever the theory
of twin souls may have done towards
personal happiness, it has certainly not
enabled us to rise one whit higher in
regard to social and conjugal morality
than those who hold marriage to be a
thing apart from love.
In truth. the quarrel goes deeper than
a mere dispute as to the relative greed
for pleasure of the Englishwomen of
today, and it is time this was al
tered. The changing conditions of wo-