There are innumerable instances in these cities where the wife pays
the rent, and meets all the family expenses, and furnishes the tobacco
and the beer for the lord of the household. No wonder parents put on
all the brakes to stop such a train of disaster. They have too often
seen the gold ring put on the finger at the altar turning out to be
the iron link of a chain of domestic servitude. What a farce it is for
a man who cannot support himself, and not worth a cent in the world,
to take a ring which he purchased by money stolen from his
grandmother's cupboard, and put it on the finger of the bride, saying:
"With this ring I thee wed, and with all my worldly goods I thee
endow."
It is amazing to see how some women will marry men knowing nothing
about them. No merchant would sell a hundred dollars' worth of goods
on credit without knowing whether the customer was worthy of being
trusted. No man or woman would buy a house with encumbrances of
mortgages, and liens, and judgments against it uncancelled; and yet
there is not an hour of the day or night for the last ten years there
have not been women by hasty marriage entrusting their earthly
happiness to men about whose honesty they know nothing, or who are
encumbered with liens, and judgments, and first mortgages, and second
mortgages, and third mortgages of evil habits. No wonder that in such
circumstances parents in conjugating the verb in question pass from
the subjunctive mood to the indicative, and from the indicative to the
imperative. In nearly all the cases of escapade that you will hear of
the rest of your lives there will be a headlong leap over the barriers
of parental common sense and forethought. "Stolen waters are sweet,
and bread eaten in secret is pleasant. But he knoweth not that the
dead are there."