Another Western paper, the Chicago _Tribune_, complains that in that city there are 10,000 homes in which the daughters are ignorant of the simplest kind of household duties. It adds “That they do not desire to learn; that, having been brought up to do nothing except appear gracefully in society, their object in life is to marry husbands who can support them in idle luxury; that this state of things has substituted for marriages founded on love and respect a market in which the men have quoted money-values, and where a young man, however great his talents, has no chance of winning a wife from the charmed circle.” So that the pendulum has apparently swung to the other extreme. In mediæval times the women were married for their money by the lazy, selfish men; now the women are lazy and selfish, while the men toil and are married for their money. Yet there is much exaggeration in this view, which applies to only a small portion of the American people. We are far from the times when Miss Martineau complained of the feeble health of American women, and attributed it to the vacuity of their minds. Their health is still, on the average, inferior to that of English and German damsels, from whom they could also learn useful lessons in domestic matters; but intellectually the American woman has no equal in the world; while her sweetness, grace, and proverbial beauty combine into an ensemble which makes Cupid chuckle whenever he looks at a susceptible young man. Goldsmith says somewhere that “the English love with violence, and expect violent love in return.” Certainly this holds true no less of the Americans. There are indeed several favourable circumstances which combine to make Romantic Love more ardent and more prevalent in the United States than in any other part of the world. (1) The first is the intellectual culture of women just referred to, which they owe partly to the leisure they enjoy, partly to the fact that America has the best elementary schools in the world, so that their minds are aroused early from their dormant state. As Bishop Spalding remarks: “Woman here in the United States is more religious, more moral, and more intelligent than man; more intelligent in the sense of greater openness to ideas, greater flexibility of mind, and a wider acquaintance with literature.” Now the whole argument of this book tends to show that the capacity for feeling Romantic Love is dependent on intellectual culture, and increases with it; hence we might infer that there is more Love among the women of America than among those of any other country, even if this were not so patent from the greater number of Love-matches and various subtle signs known to international observers. And as the sweetest pleasure and goad of Love lies in the conviction that it is really returned, man’s Love is thus doubled in ardour through woman’s responsive sympathy.