I will note one of the evil consequences of the practice. When those who have acted in this unnatural way are no longer young, and the motives which prompted their conduct have ceased to have any weight, the husband and wife find that there is no tie between them. They have no reason to respect each other. Each condemns the other, and is in the other’s presence self-condemned. And this is one of the causes of the numerous divorces which so much astonish those who look into the social conditions of American life. Nature and our common moral sense will avenge themselves for such outrages. [Sidenote: _Life-wrecks in America._] A stranger travelling in America is not likely to receive letters to any except prosperous persons, and so, unless he is on his guard against it, his personal experience is likely to be confined to the bright and splendid side of society. But from the observations and enquiries I made, I came to the conclusion that there is no country in which the proportion of those whose destiny it is to suffer complete eclipse of happiness is so great as in the United States. Among men one chief cause of this appeared to me to be the irresistible attraction a life of heartless dissipation has for multitudes of young Americans. Why is this so? I believe their theory of social equality is responsible for some of it. They have a fatal craving to appear as fashionable, and to enjoy life as much as their wealthy neighbours. But I do not suppose that this will account for everything. After all, the careers that are open to city-bred young men are very limited. Practically for them there is not much beyond the counting-house and the store. Farming, the great employment of the country, is repulsive to them; and the ranks of the law are generally recruited from the hard-headed and enterprising sons of farmers. But be the cause what it may, there stands the fact that in the large American cities, and of course nowhere to such an extent as in New York, there is to be found a large class of young men of very limited means, who are living dissipated lives, and whose great aim is to appear fashionable—a detestable word, and a vulgar and unmanly idea, of which we in the old country have not heard much since the times of the Regency. The case of the women who fail in life is more sad than that of the men, because, while they have less control over their own destinies, the failure in establishing a happy home is to them the failure of everything. The impracticable theory of social equality, I was again led to believe, was frequently the cause of such failures. These young women have been brought up in precisely the same way as their more fortunate sisters, at the same or at similar schools. This makes, in after life, the distinctions that meet the eye—of dress, equipage, and position—enter like iron into the soul; and so the determination to appear as others do becomes the rock upon which the happiness of many is wrecked.