Early marriage, however, without previous habits of self-control, is unavailing to raise the tone of society. Marriage is no cure for diseased sex, and early licentiousness is really (as has been shown) disease. In those parts of the Continent where the lowest sexual morality exists, marriage is regarded as the opportunity for constant and unlimited license. The young man, therefore, is not allowed to marry (by the law of social custom) until he is over thirty years of age. If his health has been impaired by licentiousness, he is enjoined to resort less frequently to prostitutes, or to take a mistress; but marriage is positively forbidden by his medical advisers and discouraged by his relations. By the age of thirty his health is either completely broken down, and marriage, therefore, out of the question, or, having passed the most dangerous age of passion without breaking down, it is judged that his physical health will hold out under the opportunities of married life. The result of this system is inevitable. Marriage, being regarded as the legalization of uncontrolled passion, is so exercised until satiety ensues. Satiety is the inevitable boundary of all simply material enjoyments. Self-control being entirely wanting, the spiritual possibilities of marriage are unknown; social duty in respect to sex is a vague dream, not a reality. Physical satiety can only be met by variety; hence universal infidelity--destruction of the highest ends of marriage, the dethronement of the mother, the deterioration of the father, and the failure of the family influence as the first element in the growth of the nation. The same important truth is exemplified in the social condition of our great Indian Empire. There the custom of early, even infantine, marriage co-exists with a licentiousness truly appalling in its strength and character.[47] Lads of sixteen, thoroughly corrupted in childhood, become the fathers of a degenerate race, the girl-mothers being the hopeless slaves of simple physical instincts. Early marriage is the safeguard of society only when the self-control of chastity exists, a self-government which is essential to the formation of manly character as well as conducive to vigorous health. With the acceptance of this essential condition, the aim of all wise parents will be to secure for their children the great blessing of early marriage, to provide for them opportunities of choice, and to promote the design of Providence that the young man and young woman suited to each other shall together gain the wider experience of life.