rce,
the normal age at marriage is much higher than for the population
generally. Inexperience, as was long ago pointed out by Milton
(who had learnt this lesson to his cost), leads to shipwreck in
marriage. "They who have lived most loosely," he wrote, "prove
most successful in their matches, because their wild affections,
unsettling at will, have been so many divorces to teach them
experience."

Miss Clapperton, referring to the educated classes, advocates
very early marriage, even during student life, which might then
be to some extent carried on side by side (_Scientific
Meliorism_, Ch. XVII). Ellen Key, also, advocates early marriage.
But she wisely adds that it involves the necessity for easy
divorce. That, indeed, is the only condition which can render
early marriage generally desirable. Young people--unless they
possess very simple and inert natures--can neither foretell the
course of their own development and their own strongest needs,
nor estimate accurately the nature and quality of another
personality. A marriage formed at an early age very speedily
ceases to be a marriage in anything but name. Sometimes a young
girl applies for a separation from her husband even on the very
day after marriage.

The more or less permanent free unions formed among us in Europe are
usually to be regarded merely as trial-marriages. That is to say they are
a precaution rendered desirable both by uncertainty as to either the
harmony or the fruitfulness of union until actual experiment has been
made, and by the practical impossibility of otherwise rectifying any
mistake in consequence of the antiquated rigidity of most European divorce
laws. Such trial marriages are therefore demanded by prudence and caution,
and as foresight increases with the development of civilization, and
constantly grows among us, we may expect that there will be a parallel
development in the frequency of trial marriage and in the social attitude
towards such unions. The only alternative--that a radical reform in
European marriage laws should render the divorce of a legal marriage as
economical and as convenient as the divorce of a free marriage--cannot yet
be expected, for law always lags behind public opinion and public
practice.

If, however, we take a wider historical view, we find that we are in
presence of a phenomenon which, though favored by modern conditions, is