This brings us to the root of the matter: the need of a loftier popular ideal of the marriage relation. "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." While bad legislation and a low standard of social ethics continue to throw recklessly wide the door which opens to wedlock, there must of necessity be a broad way out. How ignorantly, with what utter levity,[841] are marriages often contracted; how many thousands of parents fail to give their children any serious warning against yielding to transient impulse in choosing a mate; how few have received any real training with respect to the duties and responsibilities of conjugal life! What proper check is society placing upon the marriage of the unfit? Is there any boy or girl so immature if only the legal age of consent has been reached; is there any "delinquent" so dangerous through inherited tendencies to disease or crime; is there any worn out debauchee, who cannot somewhere find a magistrate or a priest to tie the "sacred" knot? It is a very low moral sentiment which tolerates modern wife-purchase or husband-purchase for bread, title, or social position. "As our laws stare us in the face," exclaims an eloquent writer, "there is no man so drunken, so immoral, so brutal, so cruel, that he may not take to himself the purest, the most refined, the most sensitive of women to wife, if he can get her. There is no woman so paltry, so petty, so vain, so inane, so enfeebled in body and mind by corsets or chloral, flirtation, or worse, that she may not become the wife of an intellectual, honorable man, and the mother of his doomed children. There is no pauper who may not wed a pauper and beget paupers to the end of his story. There is no felon returned from his prison, or loose upon society uncondemned, who may not make a base play at wedlock, and perpetuate his diseased soul and body in those of his descendants, without restraint. There is no member of what we call our 'respectable' classes who may not, if he choose, make a mock of the awful name of marriage, in sacrilege to which we are so used that we scarcely lift an eyelid to suppress surprise or aversion at the sickening variety of the offence."[842]
[841] The following newspaper paragraph relating to a notorious wedding resort in Michigan illustrates the shocking frivolity with which the most important of human relations is sometimes treated: "It is estimated that fully 20,000 people will visit this city tomorrow to attend the third annual Maccabees' county picnic.... It is thought tomorrow will prove to be the greatest day in the history of St. Joseph as the Gretna Green of Chicago.... Fully forty-four bridal couples will arrive from Chicago to take advantage of being married free, as is offered by the Maccabees in a part of their program. The parties with matrimonial intentions, upon calling at Marriage Temple, will be furnished by County Clerk Needham with their license and a handsome marriage certificate, free of charge, provided they consent to be married in public from the verandah of the hotels. Any clergyman in the city, upon request ... , will officiate. Hundreds of excursionists from Indiana will come for the express purpose of witnessing the ceremonies." On this point read the interesting article of DENDY, "Marriage in East London," _Cont. Rev._, LXV, 427-32.