The same is also true of our women. Subjected as they are to excessively early excitement of the mind, in school and in society, they rapidly press their mothers from the stage, and though physically not giving earlier signs of being nubile than the girls of other nations, they are far earlier in the market, as it were, for the sale, as it too often is in fact, of their charms and of their lives. No doubt this so early “coming out” from the chrysalid of youth is detrimental to both man and woman. An early bloom is too apt to presage an early decay; and though our mortuary statistics, thanks to the advance of medical and sanitary science, do undoubtedly show that the average duration of life is becoming more and more extended, and that the Golden Age, in this respect, is before us rather than in the past; yet, taking a given number of persons exposed and not exposed to all the excitements of modern American civilization, there can be no doubt that the unfashionable live longer than the fashionable, the steady than the unsteady, the slowly matured than the Pallas-like monstrosities of our own day and generation. Whether or no the slow and sedate life is the happier of the twain, and whether or no the life of threescore years and ten can be compressed within the limits of two twenties, are questions beyond the scope of the present inquiry. We all know that, at the best, life is but a quickly passing dream. Provided, then, there exist sufficient self-control to wait a while, very early marriages are not so desirable as those where the ages I have mentioned have been attained; that is to say, provided the man has led a life of continence and purity, or has the strength to do so. If he has not, it may become advisable for him, in case circumstances otherwise favor, early to enter the married state; awake, as he should be, to the responsibilities this brings with it, to many of which I shall hereafter refer. And here let it be understood that extremes are always, almost without exception, to be condemned. The marriages of young children are very properly forbidden by the law; those of older children too often become necessary through their own indiscretion, and result in future as in present unhappiness. The marriage of very old people, permissible on platonic or economical grounds, is sanitarily to be disapproved, and in many instances is but the folly of the second childhood. Great disparities in age are almost always matches of interest rather than affection: the selfish greediness, the shameless yet impotent lechery, of old age joins itself well with that ambition or thirst for wealth which sells the young girl to her worse than slavery—this mating of youth to a virtual corpse.