Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/159

 way, and the right way is simply to conform to the dictates of reason and common sense.

The love of a true woman delivers a man from the thralls of avarice, lust, anger, despair, alcohol, gaming, and idleness, — the seven deadly sins around which cluster the brothel, jail, state prison, suicide, and the gallows. Want of love drives man, and woman also, to all of these, and worse.

A man was once condemned to death by an Eastern despot, who went out all saddled, all bridled, all fit for a fight, to see him die. Now the culprit was a wise man, and the king had heard that such were accustomed to crystallize their wisdom just before dying, and so, as the glittering axe was ready to fall, the king asked the man, "I say! what is the worst and most troublesome thing in life?" The man turned his head and answered, " A mother-in-law!" — "By Allah and the ten Imauns! that's true! hold on there! Give him this purse, my daughter for a wife, and proclaim him second in the kingdom. Solomon never spoke so true a word. Why, he's the king of all Solomons!" I am not sure the king was far wrong. . . . Real women want but three blessings — to be loved, to love, to engender love. ... In this country females are clamoring for the ballot, and for offices. But when a woman meddles with politics it is time to put your trust in God. . . . Every child has the right to demand that his parents love each other, and they have no right to be parents unless they do!. . Love grows by what it feeds on. If it be starved on the floor, it will leap to the window-sill. Look out now! Be careful! for, if you are not, it will take wing and fly away, and it is easier to catch sparrows by the salt-throwing process than it is to call back a love that has once fairly taken flight. . . . The man is a fool who stops to listen to tittle-tattle about his wife, and the wife is worse than silly who listens to scandal about her husband; and good-natured neighbors — especially mothers-in-law — are very apt at that sort of thing, and it would require an angel's arithmetic to count the millions of families whose peace has been utterly destroyed after that fashion. . . . That is a poor family, with a screw loose somewhere, in which the children take altogether to one parent, and wholly neglect and fear the other; and mothers who encourage such doings are guilty of a crime against God and nature, and too many there are who do it.