CONJUGAL UNFITNESS.

Thames Star, Volume VIII, Issue 2902, 4 June 1878, Page 4

CONJUGAL UNFITNESS.

It is generally supposed that every man and every woman of sound mind and 1 sound body is fitted for marriage. They Gertainly ought to be, and it may be hard to see why they are not, but very little "observation makes the fact that they are not obvious enough. As a rule everybody marries, but it can hardly be said that as a rule every marriage is happy, or anything like it. The disagreements of most couples arise doubtless from their want of adaptability to one another. If either or both bad made a different selection, they might have got on quite comfortably. But there are persons, writes the New York Times, men particularly, who seem constitutionally disqualified for matrimony or partnership of any kind ; and one of their unalterable convictions is likely to be that nature designed them for wedlock and sociability generally. Their experience may have contradicted their belief. They may hare quarrelled with all their associates from early youth upward; they may be mean, suspicious, jealous, tyrannical, enemies of friendship, repellers of sympathy and all gentle offices. StHl, their experience teaches them contraries ; they recognise consequences; but the causes they ascribe to others or at least to something outside of themselves. They are precisely as : they should be; it is their acquaintanceswho are at fault, or if not they, it is the perversity of circumstance which thwarts desirable ends. They may have been married once or twice, and found marriage hateful; but this does not prevent them from new ventures of the same sort, confident that their own affectionate and domestic disposition must eventually be answered, and the connubial happiness produced they were born to secure.

It might be thought that one inharmonious marriage, with its long train 01 unspeakable woes, would, after release by death or'divorce, invest the question of another marriage, with an awful res* ponsibility. It would seem that he or she who had suffered from one such cruel disappointment would be in dread of another, and would be deterred from re-entering a state so associated with bitterness and pain until time and reflection had given some guarantee against a recurrence of the tragedy. .But on the contrary, persons who have been unhappily married and have escaped through nature or through law, appear unusually eager -to tempt matrimonial fortune' again. They may think that, having been unlucky once, they shall be lucky a second time; that the repeated hazard will yield what the first refused. "Whatever they think, they act in a way to show that they are incapable of profiting by experience. In fact, no amount of connubial wretchedness seems to keep people out of new alliances when they are once free out of the old. They appear to be incited by wretchedness in the past to risk wretchedness in the future.

'J hey never suspect for a moment that they are not tuned to matrimony; that matrimony is a pitch above or below them, and that it and tbey can never be in accord. To them the very idea is preposterous. All that a man or woman needs for happiness, they say, is a proper mate. That may be; but there are men and woman for whom a proper mate is unobtainable, or ought to be in the interest of civilisation. Such men and women, mainly the men, have nip conception for marriage, or of the basis on which it rests. They believe that it should be all exaction on one side and all concession on the other ; that indifference or unkindness should be met with devotion ; that rudeness should evoke sympathy; that loss of esteem should be the crown of love. Failing to find congenial marriage on such terms after one or two experiments, they still persevere, and naturally persevere in vain.

Persons who get divorces, though there are many exceptions, are not generally in harmony with, the institution of marriage, or, in other words, in harmony with themselves. They expect from marriage what is not and should not be in it. They seek to get everything, and give nothing in exchange. It might be surmised that

divorced people would suspect and avoid one another"; but, oddly enough, they often have a mutual affinity. The number of divorced" men who have married divorced women would be surprising, if it were known. Is'ot unfreqiiently they get divorced again ; for one divorce makes another easy, and encourages the custom. To a certain sort of folks, too, (here is in disjunction, and recoujunc- ; tion a wild excitement not unlike drinking brandy before breakfast, and pernicious. There are persons incessantly declaiming against marriage as an intolerable evil. They have tested it fully, they declare, and therefore they know. The fact of their testing it proves nothing against marriage, but only their unfitness tor it,'

which a close observer would havo granted without the experiment. And they will be sure to test it again. Marriage, as at present managed, may not bo all that it should be; but it is so infinitely superior to anything yet proposed ir its place, that it is well to remember that its traducers, instead of touching or hurting it, are merely abusing and hurting themselves.