MATRIMONY ON A BUSINESS BASIS. First Kill the Love Germ.

Free Lance, Volume V, Issue 216, 20 August 1904, Page 6

MATRIMONY ON A BUSINESS BASIS. First Kill the Love Germ.

MR. Justice Cooper, sitting in the Divorce Court recently, remarked that ladies choosing a partner of their joys and sorrows should make enquiries as to his character. It looks all right in theory, and if love were not blind it might pan out good payable colours. Unfortunately, the engaged young man, under the influence of the love germ (which a French professor is now trying to "isolate" and destroy by an antidotal microbe) has no glaring defects m the eyes of the girl suffering from the same disease, and girls are not yet matter-of-fact enough to make enquiries that will shatter their idol and leave an aching void m their hearts for a fortnight or more * • • Close companionship is the best "culture" for the love microbe, and the disorder dims the mental vision as long as the companionship lasts. The probabilities are that if a young woman suffering from the tender passion did begin making enquiries about her probable future husband, and was told that he was "no class, she would refuse to> believe it, and call the informer a "horrid wretch." On the other hand, a man mak^n* enquiries about his soul's adored, n he gleaned the fact that she was a flirt, or anything dreadful like that, would probably want to wipe up the floor with the person from whom he gleaned it. * * * Until the whole business is run by the State, and people picked for marriage by qualified selectors, the old style of marry m haste and repent at leisure must go on. Engaged couples don't, as a rule, discover the incompatibility of temperament before marriage that is going to wreck the happy home and cause divorce proceedings. There is no system yet inaugurated of sending husbands and wives out on approval, and neither women nor men are as yet generally gifted with the judicial and enquiring mind that one might conclude a Divorce Court judge possesses, jb

A man who is, or believes himself to be, in. love is supplied by nature pro tern with every blandishment that will help his suit along, show np his good points, and keep his bad ones in the background. He showers gifts on his adored, and this, in itself, endears him to the unenquirmg female. She can't be persuaded to believe that the person who is generous enough to buy her a diamond ring will some day growl at the purchase of a wringer, or that a man who hangs over the back gate until midnight will some day hang over a bar counter while she is mend ing his socks and looking after the youngster *• * * She can't believe that the gallant lover who tells her she is the sweetest little thing on earth may, after marriage, say the same thing to a barmaid, and it hurts like anything afterwards. When science has ieduced humanity to cold-bloodedness, when it substitutes the faculty jf mathematics for the faculty to love, when the State makes full enquiries into the antecedents and characteristics of everybody, and publishes the result for general reference, then the marrying of the people will be carried out as a purely business transaction, and there will be no Divorce Court After which, the millennium.