Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/883

 NOTES AND ABSTRACTS 863

began, and many of them are very fantastic. As death became less likely, the fear of it did not rapidly dwindle, but only very slowly, and it is still dwindling only slowly. As soon as early man made himself safe, he set out to discover new things to be afraid of, new uses for the obsolete emotion. All people have perpetuated the prac- tice, and we today are still engaged in imagining and inventing things which will satisfy our appetite for suspicion and alarm. DR. GEORGE R. WILSON, A.B., in Monist, April, 1903.

Marriage as an Economic Institution. Roughly and honestly speaking, marriage is a matter of buying and selling. We have grown so squeamish and super- fine that we have come to think that marriage treated as a commercial transaction ought to be ranked among the customs of savages. But if we will be honest with ourselves we shall see that these customs have a sound basis of principle which civi- lized men must appropriate and develop, rather than despise and neglect, if they would make marriage quite satisfactory as an economic institution. Marriage must come to be the result of conviction and of high purpose, rather than of necessity or social convention. Custom and instinct must not be our guides in this matter. We must be cultured enough to make the interests of civilization our interests, and then we shall cease to be animals, even though we lead an earthly life, and shall be capable of great ideals of civic virtue and national zeal without suppressing individu- ality.

The first large question that thrusts itself upon us when considering marriage as an economical institution is : What does it imply as to the training of young women ? Perhaps it is not yet possible to decide whether very advanced intellectual training best fits a woman for home duties. If, however, our nation (England) as a whole were more intellectual, there is little doubt that those women who have gone through a college course would be considered worthy above others to become wives and bring up children, because a university education gives the mind breadth and repose, gives also public spirit, without which home life cannot make for progress. But leaving this ideal alone for the present, let us see how under existing conditions a practical improvement might be made in the education of women. A course of train- ing might be arranged to cover one or two or three years, according to the circum- stances of the student, one part of the time being given to housewifery and the rest to learning the theory and practice of education. Schools might be either state or pri- vate. Great difficulty would be found in getting sufficient elasticity in course and organization to provide for all classes of students from the richly dowered to the young woman with no appreciable means. The taxpayer, too, might reasonably object to paying the levy to support these less favorably endowed young women who were candidates for homemaking. Great though the difficulty might be, and though the time be far distant, the custom of the father's giving a dowry of a sound training for marriage to every daughter who becomes engaged, and who is therefore destined to undertake the keeping of a home and the education of children, may become as universal and as binding in this country (England) as social opinion makes the giving of a pecuniary dowry in some other nations or the capturing of a bride by force in certain savage tribes. But the difficulties, moral, social, and intellectual, would not be insuperable, and even granting that they will be insuperable for many a long year, surely the ideal of attaching the highest responsibility to parenthood is great enough to warrant the crudest suggestions as to how that ideal is to be real- ized.

The use of business language in treating of marriage jars on many people. But this is because of a false conception of love, the maker of homes. But we should lose none of the finer and higher qualities which are without money and without price if we treated love as a practical worker making use of earthly tools. We need not sup- pose that the plainer views of marriage would rob life of much of its poetry, or would bring down an institution which has been the center of romance throughout man's history to the level of the commonplace work-a-day interests which are too familiar to call forth heroic energy or lofty enthusiasm. On the contrary, we should become much more poetical and imaginative, because healthy ideas on the subject would make it possible for men to comply with the conditions of spiritual birth and growth. Mar- riage is an all-important institution, because in it " the greatest thing in the world"