124. Briefly, then, and in main points, subject in minor ones to such modifications in detail as local circumstances and characters would render expedient, those following are laws such as a prudent nation would institute respecting its marriages. Permission to marry should be the reward held in sight of its youth during the entire latter part of the course of their education; and it should be granted as the national attestation that the first portion of their lives had been rightly fulfilled. It should not be attainable without earnest and consistent effort, though put within the reach of all who were willing to make such effort; and the granting of it should be a public testimony to the fact, that the youth or maid to whom it was given had lived, within their proper sphere, a modest and virtuous life, and had attained such skill in their proper handicraft, and in arts of household economy, as might give well-founded expectations of their being able honorably to maintain and teach their children. 125. No girl should receive her permission to marry before her seventeenth birthday, nor any youth before his twenty-first; and it should be a point of somewhat distinguished honor with both sexes to gain their permission of marriage in the eighteenth and twenty-second years; and a recognized disgrace not to have gained it at least before the close of their twenty-first and twenty-fourth. I do not mean that they should in any wise hasten actual marriage; but only that they should hold it a point of honor to have the right to marry. In every year there should be two festivals, one on the first of May, and one at the feast of harvest home in each district, at which festivals their permissions to marry should be given publicly to the maidens and youths who had won them in that half-year; and they should be crowned, the maids by the old French title of Rosieres, and the youths, perhaps by some name rightly derived from one supposed signification of the word "bachelor," "laurel fruit," and so led in joyful procession, with music and singing, through the city street or village lane, and the day ended with feasting of the poor.