powers of mind and body. The young couples, when mated with due regard to suitability, would complete together, with an inspiring mutual stimulus, their preparatory career, and then enter with mutual ardour upon the special study or work of their life, which was sometimes the same for both, sometimes different.
Marriage was thus looked forward to as the era for entering upon many-sided activities and much accompanying satisfaction and happiness. The stronger sex, as was fitting and proper, then and always, still assumed the lead in matrimonial preliminaries. But if it was the young man who most usually first approached, then wooed and won the young maid; yet the latter, upon any special circumstances or emergencies, or upon the confines of a critical age, would be just as little disposed as the masculine sex to waste her opportunities, or let slip her particular likings, and thus, from any over-delicacy or untimely hesitation, wrong her life-prospects in so time-pressing and momentous a business.
But these early marriages, and this busy married life, if they produced much happiness, produced also large—indeed very large—families. The progress in this direction was truly quite as marked as in any other, in the general advance of our country and of the world. Society at large was confronted by the one special problem of ever-increasing mouths ever agape for food. But over against this one costly responsibility of the time, society could set many economies resulting from the diligence and good order of married life. The two sexes, meeting each other freely in business walks, formed early attachments, which had a restraining effect upon the passion or
