Whether this is true, viz., that, granting that the American girl is, before marriage, exposed to more temptation than her English sister, the latter more than makes up for it in the freedom of married life, is another quagmire. No statistics, whether of marriage, of divorce, or of the ratio of increase in population, are of any use as a guide. Each man or woman, who has had any opportunity of judging, will be guided solely by the narrow circle of his or her personal experience; and I know that the man whose opinion on the subject I would most regard holds exactly opposite views to myself--and what my own may be I trust I may be excused from stating. But while on the subject of the relative conjugal morality of the two peoples opinions will differ widely with individual experience, I have never met a shadow of disagreement in competent opinion in regard to the facts about the youth of the two countries. It may be, as I have heard a clever woman say, that the way for a member of her sex to get the greatest enjoyment out of life is to be brought up in America and married in England. If so let us rejoice that so many charming women choose the way which opens to them the possibility of the greatest felicity. There is, of course, a widespread impression in England that American women as a rule are not womanly. The average American girl acquires when young a self-possession and an ability to converse in company which Englishwomen only, and then not always, acquire much later in life. Therefore the American girl appears, to English eyes, to be "forward," and she is assumed to possess all the vices which go with "forwardness" in an English maiden. Which is entirely unjust. Let us remember that there is hardly a girl growing up in England to-day who would not have been considered forward and ill-mannered to an almost intolerable degree by her great-grandmother. But that the girls of to-day are any the less womanly, in all that is sweet and essential in womanliness, than any generation of their ancestors, I for one do not believe. Nor do I believe that in another generation, when they will perhaps, as a matter of course, possess all the social precocity (as it seems to us) of the American girl of to-day, they will thereby be any the less true and tender women than their mothers.