MAN AND MATRIMONY.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10037, 6 May 1910, Page 4

MAN AND MATRIMONY.

We are all perhaps nowadays, says the London Times, inclined to take too tragic a view of marriage. We do not see that it has persisted as an institution, not only because the higher will of man is in favour of it, but also because human nature and circumstance on the whole are suited by it. In countries where marriages of convenience prevail the ordinary man and woman, marrying without love, grow fond of each other, and i they would not be parted if they ! could. If only we understood the true romance, we should see that this is a fact as wonderful and romantic as all the great passions of the world. It is not difficult but easy for men and women to love each other with a disinterested affection when once they are joined by the tie of children; and it is mere sentimental perversity which makes us pretend that such love is a rarity and precious because it is rare. It does not take a hero or a poet to love well and constantly. The wondertul and romantic fact is that the ordinary man can do this. If i it were not so, if, as some people pretend, marriage were a slavery imposed upun the cowardice of the I ordinary man, there would be an end of it to-morrow; or rather it would never have come into being at all. It is not a slavery even for the philanderer, but rather a wholesome discip • line, if it turns him into a father and gives him something better to. do than to philander. Women know this by instinct and they take a far less tragic and sentimental view of marriage than men do. They are less afraid of it because they expect less of it. Men have made endess and foolish jokes about the eagerness ot women to marry; they da not understand that it is an eagerness to be engaged in the serious business of life, the same kind of eagerness that makes a youth with nothing lo rlo emigrate or enlist. Women think rather of the cdds in favour of happy marriage than of the orida ggainst it, for they think ot the family. Hence a woman will sometimes force a philanderer to

marry her under threat of an action for breach of promise, and she will this because marriage is for her not an exciting experience, but a serious business. No doubt she likes the man well enough in spite of his philandering, and feels sure that she can soon cure him of ihat. She does not expect perfection either in him or in her married life ;but she is ready to make the best of it and of him, and she regards it, not as a desperate adventure, but as a natural process.