Only the older woman who has kept in touch not only with young life
outside her own family but with the problems that modern changes in
education, in industry, in art and literature, press upon the mind,
can understand why so many young people to-day distrust everything
that is old and welcome everything that seems new, however ancient it
may actually be. Many of the newest things proclaimed are old mistakes
of human nature revamped for a masquerade. A little study, for
example, would show many young people who think they are responding to
fresh revelation of the right relation of the sexes that they are
really coming under the spell of some ancient and discarded plan of
getting all satisfaction out of a relationship without assuming any
obligation in return.
=The Wisdom of the Ages Must be the Guide of Youth.=--There is no
chance of putting youth back into tutelage to age in any personal
relation and in the old sense. Wise older people do not wish that.
What is happening, and will be accelerated in action when the first
flush of youthful consciousness of power is a bit balanced by
knowledge of life's difficulties, is this; the wisdom of the ages, not
the wisdom of their own parents and family alone, will be available to
youth and used by youth in ever-increasing reverence. Not that some
one who has lived longer shall of right determine a young life, but
that young life shall learn more than in any past time it could do
what the experience of the race has to teach. Happy the child whose
parent can interpret this wisdom of life and happy the parent whose
child can even now see that there is wisdom from the past to
interpret.
Meanwhile, the fact that so many people marry and so many marriages
turn out happily speaks well for the wisdom of youth or else gives
testimony of the kindness of the fate that watches over lovers. We are
told that at the ages of twenty to twenty-five half of the women and
one-fourth of the men in the United States are married, and at the
period of life between thirty-five and forty-five years only seventeen
per cent. of the men are single and only eleven per cent. of the
women; while at sixty-five years and over only six per cent. of either
sex are listed as having never married. If out of this large
proportion who dare matrimony on their own motion, and often without
even the parental approbation, only one marriage out of ten to twelve
turns out so badly that the parties ask to be released from their
marriage vows, surely it argues well for independence in choosing
one's partner for one's self even if there are mishaps and disasters
for the few.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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