It has seemed as if the development of this sentiment, and the realization of responsibility, were making the American girl more conservative in certain ways, and that she was, in the matter of early marriages for example, drawing nearer to the older systems. Sentimentally, early marriages are a good thing. Perhaps they are practically also. Martin Luther and other wise commentators have pointedly advised them. But the century has scarcely offered approval. Stubbs, in his “Anatomy of Abuses,” complained bitterly that it should be possible for “every sawcy boy of xiiij., xvi., or xx yeres of age to catch a woman and marie her without any fear of God at all.” Early marriages were a source of great complaint in our colonial days. Probably the caution of our young women is responsible for the fact, now frequently quoted, that early marriages are less frequent. At the first sign of a new caution there is always the alarmist who jumps to the conclusion that he is to be put off until the time De Quincey set for the amusement of taking home a printing press,--“the twilight of his dotage”; and it will be said of this or that section when some one is in the mood to say it, as Heine said of France in 1837, that “girls do not fall in love in this country.” [Illustration] Some characteristics of the era may not be attributed to anything that is new in our system. Flirtation, for example, is a very old vice. Yet, as every calling has a conscience of its own, I like to think that flirtation has been harshly painted in some respects. If it does not show specific modifications in our longitudes, we must conclude that it is a necessary evil. At any rate we know from more than one biologist that flirting is not solely a human trait. This in a measure disperses and softens the responsibility. And one must not be hasty in marking flirtation. There is the seeming and the real, like true and false croup. Many women have been accused of flirting who were never more serious in their lives, just as we have known them to be cruelly accused of sincerity at a time when their whimsicality should have been patent to the least intelligent of observers. In an era when letter-writing is said to be dying out, it is not surprising that love-letters should come under suspicion. Indeed, there have been many temptations to cynicism. The law courts have been invoked to decide whether love-letters belong to the sender or to the receiver; nice questions have grown out of misunderstandings as to proposals of marriage. It is hinted that men are to become revoltingly crafty as to things put upon paper, and that the young lady of a not remote future will receive her lover’s notes moist and blurred from the embrace of a copying book.