A happy marriage need not be a successful one. Some couples attain happiness through sorrow, grief, and failure. The so-called happy marriage, like happiness itself, is only a myth, made up of anticipation and memory. You have only to look into the calm and wrinkled faces of old women, and talk to them to discover that the outcome of unselfishness and abnegation forms the nearest approach to happiness in married life or out of it. It is the bearing of the burdens of life that constitutes its happiness.
THE EVILS OF EARLY MARRIAGE.--No woman has the vitality to stand the strain of maternity before the twenty-third year. If a girl marries at eighteen years of age she gives the world children totally unfit to struggle with its problems. At about twenty-two years she may give one child of value to the world, but all others following will be increasingly unfit. In early marriages children are apt to come too frequently, and this is one cause of infant mortality. Statistics show that children born with an interval between them of only one year have a mortality of one hundred per cent, higher rating than those born with an interval of two years. And if these children are the progeny of very young mothers the percentage is even greater. The percentage of children who are malformed and idiotic is greater among those born of too young parents. It has been shown that the child can only inherit what the parents possess. If the parents are not of an age when all the powers are at their highest, the child is robbed of just this amount of growth and force lacking; no amount of education or training can supply this loss.
There is another feature of early marriages that should receive serious consideration. A girl of eighteen or twenty has not reached that period of growth where certain inherited tendencies will show. If she has inherited a predisposition to consumption she may outgrow this period provided she is permitted to reach her full growth without subjecting her constitution to any strenuous physical or mental strain. If, however, this girl marries and becomes a mother, the incident effect upon her health will most likely weaken her to the extent of bringing to the surface the inherited tendency. Many mothers succumb to just such conditions, where had they remained single until a later period they could have assumed the responsibility of maternity without any evil consequences.