The second principle to be kept steadily in view is the encouragement of early marriage. A statesman, writing a generation ago on the causes in the past, which have contributed to the prosperity of England, says: ‘The lower and working classes are an early and universally marrying people; this sacred habit is one which, while it has secured the virtue and promoted the happiness of the country, has multiplied its means and extended its power, and constituted Britain the most powerful and prosperous Empire of the world.’[46] A quaint old writer has said: ‘The forbidding to marry is the doctrine of devils.’ The universal testimony of experience may be summed up in the words of Montesquieu: ‘Who can be silent when the sexes, corrupting each other even by the natural sensations themselves, fly from a union that ought to make them better, to live in that that always renders them worse? It is a rule drawn from nature, that the more the number of marriages is diminished, the more corrupt are those who have entered into that state; the fewer married men, the less fidelity is there in marriage.’ All short-sighted Governments that impose unnatural restrictions upon marriage are compelled, by the increase of bastardy and its attendant evils, to repeal such restrictions. Grohman, speaking of the causes of the present immorality of the Tyrolese, says: ‘Very lately only has the Austrian Government annulled the law which compelled a man desirous of marriage to prove a certain income, and, further, to be the owner of a house or homestead of some kind, before the license was granted. Next in importance is the lax way in which the Church deals with licentious misconduct, it being in her eyes a minor iniquity expiated by confession.’ The obstacles to marriage in the military German Empire must be regarded as one of the causes of that moral corruption which we now observe in a country once so distinguished for home virtues--a corruption which threatens to shake the foundations of the great German race.