“The Columbian World’s Exposition will be international because it will hospitably welcome and entertain the people and the products of every nation in the world. It will give to them the fullest opportunity to teach us, and learn from us, and to open new avenues of trade with our markets, and discover materials which will be valuable in theirs. But its creation, its magnitude, its location, its architecture, and its striking and enduring features will be American. The city in which it is held, taking rank among the first cities in the world after an existence of only fifty years, is American. The great inland fresh-water sea, whose waves will dash against the shores of Jackson Park is American. The prairie, extending westward with its thousands of square miles of land, a half century ago a wilderness, but to-day gridironed with railroads, spanned with webs of electric wires, rich in prosperous farms, growing villages, ambitious cities, and an energetic, educated, and progressive people is purely American. “The Centennial Exhibition of 1876 celebrated the first hundred years of independence of the Republic of the United States. The Columbian Exhibition celebrates the discovery of a continent which has become the home of peoples of every race, the refuge for those persecuted on account of their devotion to civil and religious liberty, and the revolutionary factor in the affairs of this earth, a discovery which has accomplished more for humanity in its material, its intellectual, and its spiritual aspects than all other events since the advent of Christ.” CHAPTER VI. SOCIETY’S FOUNDATION-STONE. There ought to be a radical change in marriage customs in the United States, if we would avoid a terrible deterioration of social life. In the early days of our country, when most of the inhabitants were representatives of the classes which have supplied populations for all new countries, marriage, as among the lower order of peasantry everywhere else in the world, and among the savages besides, was a mere mating of male and female. Women were brought over by shiploads to be disposed of, as wives, to the earlier Virginia planters; no stories have come down to us of cruelties or mismatings, yet the transactions were as plainly a matter of purchase and sale as any in the subsequent trade in black slaves. The rapid settlement of the country, the improvement in civilization, which has come through the multiplication of large villages and of cities, the general facilities for obtaining education, such as exist in no other country, have made ours the land above all others in which generations may rise rapidly from the social position of their ancestors. Consequently there is no part of the world in which the marriage relation should be so closely guarded as here.