n fashioned, how far more
trustworthy and valuable must it probably prove in the greater
matter--greater, I mean, as regards the interests of the race--for which
it has been mainly or almost solely developed!

I do not doubt that, as the world goes on, a deeper sense of moral
responsibility in the matter of marriage will grow up among us. But it
will not take the false direction of ignoring these our profoundest and
holiest instincts. Marriage for money may go; marriage for rank may go;
marriage for position may go; but marriage for love, I believe and
trust, will last for ever. Men in the future will probably feel that a
union with their cousins or near relations is positively wicked; that a
union with those too like them in person or disposition is at least
undesirable; that a union based upon considerations of wealth or any
other consideration save considerations of immediate natural impulse, is
base and disgraceful. But to the end of time they will continue to feel,
in spite of doctrinaires, that the voice of nature is better far than
the voice of the Lord Chancellor or the Royal Society; and that the
instinctive desire for a particular helpmate is a surer guide for the
ultimate happiness, both of the race and of the individual, than any
amount of deliberate consultation. It is not the foolish fancies of
youth that will have to be got rid of, but the foolish, wicked, and
mischievous interference of parents or outsiders.

RIGHT AND LEFT

Adult man is the only animal who, in the familiar scriptural phrase,
'knoweth the right hand from the left.' This fact in his economy goes
closely together with the other facts, that he is the only animal on
this sublunary planet who habitually uses a knife and fork, articulate
language, the art of cookery, the common pump, and the musical glasses.
His right-handedness, in short, is part cause and part effect of his
universal supremacy in animated nature. He is what he is, to a great
extent, 'by his own right hand;' and his own right hand, we may shrewdly
suspect, would never have differed at all from his left were it not for
the manifold arts and trades and activities he practises.

It was not always so, when wild in woods the noble savage ran. Man was
once, in his childhood on earth, what Charles Reade wanted him again to
be in his maturer centuries, ambidextrous. And lest any lady readers of
this volume--in the Cape of Good Hope, for example, or the remoter
portions of