Among the conflicting rights and wrongs of the two systems it is very difficult to say which is the better, which the wiser. If it seems a horrible thing to marry a young girl without her consent, or without any more knowledge of the man with whom she is to pass her life than can be got by seeing him once or twice in formal family conclave, it seems quite as bad to let our women roam about the world at the age when their instincts are strongest and their reason weakest--open to the flatteries of fools and fops--the prey of professed lady-killers--the objects of lover-like attentions by men who mean absolutely nothing but the amusement of making love--the subjects for erotic anatomists to study at their pleasure. Who among our girls after twenty carries an absolutely untouched heart to the man she marries? Her former predilection may have been a dream, a fancy--still it was there; and there are few wives who, in their little tiffs and moments of irritation, do not feel, 'If I had married my first love, _he_ would not have treated me so.' Perhaps a wise man does not care for a mere baseless thought; but all men are not wise, and to some a spiritual condition is as real as a physical fact. Others however, do not trouble themselves for what has gone before if they can but secure what follows after; but we imagine that most men would rather not know their wives' dreams; and _cet autre_, however shadowy, is a rival not specially desired by the average husband. If the independence of life and free intercourse between young men and maidens is in its degree dangerous in England, what must it be in America, where anything like chaperonage is unknown, and where girls and boys flock together without a mamma or a guardian among them? where engaged couples live under the same roof for months at a time, also without a mamma or a guardian? and where the young men take the young women about on night excursions alone, and no harm thought by any one? Is human nature really different in America from what it is in the Old World? Are Columbia's sons in truth like Erin's of old time, so good or so cold? It is a saying hard of acceptance to us who are accustomed to regard our daughters as precious things to be taken care of--if not quite so frail as the French regard theirs, yet not too secure, and certainly not to be left too much to themselves with only young men for their guardians. They are our lambs, and we look out for wolves. To be sure the comparative paucity of women in the United States, and the conviction which every girl has that she may pretty well make her own choice, help to keep matters straight. That is easy to be understood. There is no temptation to eat green berries in an orchard full of ripe fruit. But if this be true of America, then the converse must be true of England, where the redundancy of women is one of the most patent facts of the time, and where consequently they cannot so well afford to indulge that pride of person which