Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1875 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XVIII. MARRIED FOREVER. It is strange how private experience repeats itself in the history of individuals, and how perpetually new it seems, notwithstanding that it is a tale that has been told o'er and o'er again. It is a very large and exceptional nature which can realize another experience than its own, and come into rapport with the causes of things, without having felt or known the effects. The relations of the sexes have always been a fruitful source of speculation and theory. Apparently productive of much that is evil, --necessarily so, so long as human nature is imperfect, -- the effort has always been to reconcile impossibilities, to harmonize conditions dependent upon human weakness, human frailty, human ideas of responsibility, and adjust the supremacy of the individual to a unitary system (marriage), which demands, as its first requisite, the subordination of individual tastes, desires, feelings, and wishes, to the interests and well-being of the family. The real difficulty seems to be that the institution of the family is, as yet, altogether beyond our ordinary methods of reasoning and comprehension. It is based on the platform of duty and self-renunciation. Men still cling to self-assertion as their inalienable right, and women have learned the lesson, and are clamoring too for separate recognition, and acknowledgment for their right to individual life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I am not certain but that it is these premises that bring our whole social superstructure to the ground. I doubt whether men or women have any right to life, or liberty, or the pursuit of happiness, or, in fact, any rights at all. I doubt whether liberty is possible, or happiness possible, to the man or woman who pursues it. I..
