ings of boy or girl, or to place
obstacles in their way. They are not thought of as opposite sexes; it
is "just all the young people together." The result is a spirit of
absolute good comradeship. There is little atmosphere of the unknown
or the mysterious about the opposite sex. The love that leads to
marriage is thus apt to be the product of a wider experience, and to
be based on a more intimate knowledge. The sentimental may cry fie on
so clear-sighted a Cupid, but the sensible cannot but rejoice over
anything that tends to the undoing of the phrase "lottery of
marriage."

That the ideal attitude towards and in marriage has been attained in
average American society I should be the last to assert. The way in
which American wives leave their husbands toiling in the sweltering
city while they themselves fleet the time in Europe would alone give
me pause. But I am here concerned with the relative and not the
absolute; and my contention is that the average marriage in America is
apt to be made under conditions which, compared with those of other
nations, increase the chances of happiness. A great deal has been said
and written about the inconsistency of the marriage laws of the
different States, and much cheap wit has been fired off at the fatal
facility of divorce in the United States; but I could not ascertain
from my own observation that these defects touched any very great
proportion of the population, or played any larger part in American
society, as I have defined it, than the differences between the
marriage laws of England and Scotland do in our own island. M.
Bourget, quite arbitrarily and (I think) with a trace of the
proverbial Gallic way of looking at the relations of the sexes, has
attributed the admitted moral purity of the atmosphere of American
society to the coldness of the American temperament and the _sera
juvenum Venus_. It seems to me, however, that there is no call to
disparage American virtue by the suggestion of a constitutional want
of liability to temptation, and that Mark Twain, in his somewhat
irreverent rejoinder, is much nearer the mark when he attributes the
prevalent sanctity of the marriage tie to the fact that the husbands
and wives have generally married each other for love. This is
undoubtedly the true note of America in this particular, though it may
not be unreservedly characteristic of the smart set of New York. If
the sacred flame of Cupid could be exposed to the alembic of
statis