Fifteen or sixteen years was considered the suitable age for a bride. Sometimes girls were married when they were barely fourteen, while nowadays it is rare for a girl to marry before she is twenty, and the majority marry between the ages of twenty and thirty. Furthermore, in many states of the ancient world the legal age for matrimony, both for the woman and the man, was much lower than it is to-day in European and American legal codes. This is not surprising. In all times and in all places in which matrimony is considered not as a personal matter of sentiment, but as a social act which must be regulated and directed by the parents, the object is to marry off the young people as quickly as possible. Often they are actually betrothed when they are still children, and share each other’s games of running and jumping. This was a fairly common practice in ancient Rome amongst the nobility, as it is a thriving custom in the China of to-day. Nor is it difficult to understand the reason for this procedure, which, considered by itself, seems to us extravagant and senseless. Love in all times and in all places is a most intractable passion. It is, therefore, more easy in such matters, for the elders to impose their wills and cold-blooded arrangements, on girls of fourteen or fifteen and boys of seventeen or eighteen, than on women or men of twenty-five. Naturally such precocious marriages, contracted between young people who had not yet had a taste of the world, were not free from dangers and serious inconveniences. But these dangers and inconveniences appeared to contemporary eyes less great than those which would have arisen, if the young had been left to follow the dictates of their own feelings.