(Discusses love marriages, how they can be made, and the duty of parents in respect to them.) I have shown how economic forces in our society make for later and later marriage; and at the present time economic forces are so overwhelming that all other forces are hardly worth mentioning in comparison. You are, let us say, the mother of a boy of eighteen, and you have what you call "common sense"—meaning thereby a grasp of the money facts of life. If your darling boy of eighteen should come to you with a grave face and announce, "Mother dear, I have met the girl I love, and we have decided that we want to get married"—you would consider that the most absurd thing you had ever heard in all your born days, and you would tell the lad that he was a baby, and to run along and play. If he persisted in his crazy notion, you and your husband and all the brothers and sisters and relatives and friends both of the boy and the girl would set to work, by scolding and ridiculing, to make life a misery for them, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred you would break down the young couple's marital intention.
But now, let us try another supposition. Let us suppose that your darling boy of eighteen should come to you again and say, "Mother dear, some of the boys are going to spend this evening in a brothel, and I have decided to go along." Would you think that was the most absurd thing you had ever heard in all your born days? Or would you answer, "Yes, of course, my boy; that is what I had in mind when I made you give up the girl you loved"? No, you would not answer that. But here is the vital fact—it doesn't matter what you would answer, for you would never have a chance to answer. When a mother's darling wants to get married, he comes and asks his mother's blessing; but never does a mother's darling ask a blessing before he goes with the other boys to a brothel. He just goes. Maybe he borrows the money from some other fellow, and next day tells you he went to a theater. Or maybe he picks up some poor man's daughter on the street, and takes her into the park, or up on the roof of a tenement. Some such thing he does, to find satisfaction for an instinct which you in your worldly wisdom or your heavenly piety spurn and ridicule.
I do not wish to exaggerate. If you are an exceptionally wise and tactful mother, you may keep the confidence of your boy, and guide him day by day through his temptations and miseries, and keep him chaste. But the more you try that, the more apt you will be to come to my conclusion, that late marriage is a crime against the race; the more aware you will be of the danger, either that his boy friends may break him down, or that some lewd woman may come to his bedroom in the night-time. Never will you be able to be quite sure that he is not lying to you, because of his shame, and the pain he cannot bear to inflict upon you. Never will you be quite sure that he is not hiding some cruel disease, sneaking off to some quack who takes his money and leaves him worse than before—until finally he shoots off his head, as happened to a nephew of an old and dear friend of mine.
Such is the problem of the mother of a son; and now, what about the mother of a daughter? This seems much simpler; because your daughter is not generally troubled with sex cravings, and if you teach her the proprieties, and see that she is carefully chaperoned, you may reasonably hope that she will be chaste. But some day you expect that she will marry; and then comes your problem. If you are the usual mother, you are looking for some one who can maintain her in the state of life to which she is accustomed. If a fairy prince would come along, or a plaster saint, you would be pleased; but failing that, you will take a successful business man, one who has made his way in the world and secured himself a position. But turn back to the figures I gave you a while ago. If this man is thirty years of age, there is at least a fifty-fifty chance that he has had some venereal disease; and while the doctors claim to cure these diseases absolutely, we must bear in mind that doctors are human, and sometimes claim more than they perform. Every doctor will admit, if you pin him down, that these diseases burrow deeply into the tissues, and many times are supposed to be cured when they are only hidden.
Here is, in a nutshell, the problem of the mother of a daughter. If you marry your daughter at seventeen to a lad of her own age, you have a very good chance of marrying her to a person who is chaste. If you marry her to a man of twenty-five, you have perhaps one chance in a hundred. If you marry her to a man of thirty-five, you have perhaps one chance in ten thousand. You may not like these facts; I do not like them myself; but I have learned that facts are none the less facts on that account.
You know the average society bud of eighteen, and her attitude to a boy of the same age. She regards him as a child; and you think, perhaps, that it is natural for a girl to be interested in men of thirty-five and even forty-five. But I tell you that it is not natural, it is simply one of the perversions of pecuniary sex. The girl is interested in such men, because all her young life she has been carefully coached for the marriage market; because she is dressed for it, and solemnly brought out, and introduced to other players of this exciting game of marriage for money, with its incredible prizes of automobiles and jewels and palaces full of servants, a............