_Don’t marry a drunkard._ He will promise, by all that’s good, great, and holy, to reform. How many more like him have made just such promises? He can’t keep such a promise if he would. Make him reform a couple of years at least, on trial, before you marry him. It will be time enough then to risk a life-partnership, to chain your hopes to an unfortunate creature whose sense and judgment are corrupted, not by will, perhaps, but by habit stronger than reason. With most men this habit becomes a desire. They are bound to feed the fire that burns them. They have no voice in the matter, and cannot, if they would, break the strong fetters that bind them in irons, like the prison bars confine their victims. It’s a sorry picture to behold a fair young girl chained to a being with a will all lost and debauched in appetite for drink; a section of the land of departed evil spirits can only equal her daily misery. Children must bear it, friends submit to it, and all of character, sweetness of temper, or refinement in one’s nature will revolt at the coarseness of the wrecked and wretched career of a drunkard’s life. He is an object of pity, and a being to be shunned in matrimony, no matter how many promises he makes or how good he is otherwise. To avoid long sorrow, disgrace, and regret, avoid him. If you had two lives and one to dispose of, at any cost, mate with a drunkard and die a thousand deaths. Your health, peace, and happiness will go with his. “Art thou mated with a clown, Then the baseness of his nature Will have weight to drag thee down.” Such a man will kill his wife, burn his own child, sacrifice everything on earth when scourged by this degrading passion. More could be urged, but let the starving families, the criminal courts, the idiotic children, tell the rest: the story is too dreadful to dwell upon. It is monstrous. Life becomes a burden, and death a sweet release from such a cross. Of all the matches on earth, the most to be dreaded and avoided is the drunkard’s wife. _Don’t marry a fast man or woman._ Something tells us that black logs will darken the whitest garments. The edge of virtue once dulled is never quite so keen afterwards. It may be very well to speak slightingly of wild oats, but who cares to know that their oats are a second crop? Who is willing to believe that they are the last resort of one who has pleaded and pledged to hundreds or even dozens before her, or waits an opportunity to make as many more pledges as occasion may offer? Fast men are not satisfied with one vice merely, but follow on to many. They may drink, gamble, sport, and venture, and step by step indulge in the kindred vices of lewdness, till disease shall fasten its clutches in their burning blood and run in their veins for a lifetime. They are rarely satisfied with one home, one wife, and one family.