ssist in perpetuating the
species.

We might urge that up to this moment neither does her self-knowledge
qualify her to choose a life-companion, nor can her education be
finished, nor is her experience sufficient for her to enter on the
duties of a matron. But we do not appeal to these arguments. There are
others still more forcible. If her own health, life, and good looks are
of value to her, if she has any wish for healthy, sound minded children,
she will refrain from premature nuptials.

A too youthful wife finds marriage not a pleasure but a pain. Her
nervous system is prostrated by it; she is more liable to weakness and
diseases of the womb; and if of a consumptive family, she runs great
risk of finding that fatal malady manifest itself after a year or two of
wedded life. It is very common for those who marry young to die young.

From statistics which have been carefully compiled, it is proven that
the first labors of very young mothers are much more painful, tedious,
and dangerous to life, than others. As wives, they are frequently
visited either with absolute sterility, and all their lives must bear
the reproach of barren women, or, what to many is hardly less
distasteful, they have an excessively numerous family.

What adds to their sufferings in the latter event, is that the children
of such marriages are rarely healthy. They are feeble, sickly,
undersized, often with some fault of mind or body, which is a cross to
them and their parents all their lives. They inherit more readily the
defects of their ancestors, and, as a rule, die at earlier years than
the progeny of better-timed unions.

These considerations are formidable enough, it would seem, to prevent
young girls from marrying, without the need of a law, as exists in some
countries. Moreover, they are not imaginary, but real, as many a woman
finds out to her cost.

The objections to marriage after the age of twenty-five are less cogent.
They extend only to the woman herself. She should know that the first
labors of wives over thirty are nearly _twice_ as fatal as those between
twenty and twenty-five. Undoubtedly nature points to the period between
the twentieth and twenty-fifth year as the fittest one for marriage in
the woman.

_LOVE._

ITS POWER ON HUMANITY.

Love, pure love, true love, what can we say of it? The dream of youth;
the cherished reminiscence of age; celebrated in the songs of poets;
that which impels the warrior to his