ion
would institute respecting its marriages. Permission to marry should
be the reward held in sight of its youth during the entire latter part
of the course of their education; and it should be granted as the
national attestation that the first portion of their lives had been
rightly fulfilled. It should not be attainable without earnest and
consistent effort, though put within the reach of all who were willing
to make such effort; and the granting of it should be a public
testimony to the fact, that the youth or maid to whom it was given
had lived, within their proper sphere, a modest and virtuous life, and
had attained such skill in their proper handicraft, and in arts of
household economy, as might give well-founded expectations of their
being able honorably to maintain and teach their children.

125. No girl should receive her permission to marry before her
seventeenth birthday, nor any youth before his twenty-first; and it
should be a point of somewhat distinguished honor with both sexes to
gain their permission of marriage in the eighteenth and twenty-second
years; and a recognized disgrace not to have gained it at least before
the close of their twenty-first and twenty-fourth. I do not mean that
they should in any wise hasten actual marriage; but only that they
should hold it a point of honor to have the right to marry. In every
year there should be two festivals, one on the first of May, and one
at the feast of harvest home in each district, at which festivals
their permissions to marry should be given publicly to the maidens and
youths who had won them in that half-year; and they should be crowned,
the maids by the old French title of Rosieres, and the youths, perhaps
by some name rightly derived from one supposed signification of the
word "bachelor," "laurel fruit," and so led in joyful procession, with
music and singing, through the city street or village lane, and the
day ended with feasting of the poor.

126. And every bachelor and rosiere should be entitled to claim, if
they needed it, according to their position in life, a fixed income
from the State, for seven years from the day of their marriage, for
the setting up of their homes; and, however rich they might be by
inheritance, their income should not be permitted to exceed a given
sum, proportioned to their rank, for the seven years following that in
which they had obtained their permission to marry, but should
accumulate in the trust of the State u