_Psychical Fitness for Marriage._--At the beginning of this chapter it was insisted that we must carefully distinguish between physical or physiological fitness for mating and complete fitness for marriage--which, though it includes mating, is vastly more. Few will question the proposition that physical fitness for marriage is reached only some years after puberty; so complete psychical fitness for marriage may well be later still. We should thus have a second disharmony superposed upon the first. But, instead, when we look round us, we may often be inclined to ask whether, for many girls and women, the age of psychical fitness for marriage is ever reached at all; and we have to ask ourselves how far this delay or indefinite postponement of such fitness is due to natural conditions, or how far it is due to the fact that we bring up our girls to be, for instance, sideboard ornaments, as Ruskin said a generation ago. I believe that this disparity between the age of physical fitness for marriage and the attainment of that outlook upon life and its duties, without which marriage must be so perilous, is one of the most important practical problems of our time, and that its solution is to be found in the principle of education for parenthood, which we have already considered at such length. It is a most serious matter that marriage should be delayed as it is beyond the best age for the commencement of motherhood; it is injurious to the individual and her motherhood, and whether delay occurs, as it does, disproportionately in different cases, or disproportionately within a nation, in the different classes of which it is composed, the consequences, as we have seen, are of the most stupendous possible kind. Yet observe what a difficulty we are faced with. Perceiving the injurious consequences of delay in marriage--consequences which, as we have seen, if considered only as they show themselves in the most horrible department of pathology, would be sufficient to demand the most urgent consideration--we may almost feel inclined to agree with the utterly blind and deplorable doctrine too common amongst parents and schoolmistresses, who should know so much better, that it is good to see the young things falling in love, and that the sooner they are married the better. Every one whose eyes are open knows how often the consequences of such teaching and practice are disastrous; and if there is anything which we should discourage in our present study, it is that marriage in haste and repentance at leisure to which these blind guides so often lead their blind victims.