Rensselaer Standard, Volume 1, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 August 1879 — Unlucky Marriages. [ARTICLE]

Unlucky Marriages.

The truth is that these too frequent “unhappy marriages” are the offspring Of ignorance quite as much as of actual sin or *rong. Fools, and especially vicious fools, have no right to get possession of a woman’s life and soul which they cannot comprehend, and the elevating influence of which they throw away even more by stupidity than by wiliulness. A woman, by her sex and character, has a claim to many things beside shelter, food and clothing. She is not less a woman for being wedded; and the man who is fit to be trusted with a good wife recollects all which this implies, and shows bimself perpetually chivalrous, sweet spoken, considerate and deferential. The fools and brutes who abound among us may think such demands hard; but they are not nearly as bad as to live a cat-and-dog life, missing the dearest possibilities es human intercourse. •

■What right has a man to expect happiness in a household who brings no sunshine into it? What right has he to look for the graces and refinements of early love when he violates them by rough speech, ill-mailners and the disregard of those little things upon which the self-respect for a wife is built and maintained? The cynic who rails at marriages is generally one and the same with the thoughtless egotist who files Into the presence of his wife careless, stubborn and sour-tempered, though he never went to his mistress except on his beat behavior. The fete is horrible which a pure and faithful girl may endure by encountering in-him whom she weds not mere actual cruelty or injury, but stupid incompetence to understand a woman’s needs, dull forgetfulness of the daily graces of life and oblivion of the feet that wnile men have the world woman have only their homes. The grossnesses of masculine ingratitude do not, indeed, often lead to visible catastrophe nor grow into absolute tyranny, but they equally tend that way. They drag down a wife’s oul to the point where she must despair; they change

■« meaning marriage to nd weariness; they spoil the bat best and finest of all vhich each man obtains who enable good woman for his , and they cost more to a isholds than money or re-, ui ever pay back. —[Yonkers