Without doubt, the greatest source of happiness, as known to human beings, is love. Scott voiced the sentiment of all rational and normal persons when he said:

It is owing to the fact that we cannot enjoy anything to the fullest extent alone, since our nature is so constituted that we must have company in our pleasures, that friends are indispensable. Cicero realized this over two thousand years ago when he said that, “The fruit of talent, and worth, and every excellence, is gathered most fully when it is bestowed upon every one most nearly connected with us.” Appreciating this, nature has given us the love and friendship of parents in our childhood; of the companions of our youth as we grow older; of our life-partner at a later period, and last, the love of our children and grandchildren, so that, by an interest in their lives, we may become ourselves rejuvenated. In this, as in everything else of a physical or mental character, we start at the bottom, and, by a crescendo movement, reach the acme of the condition which with age diminishes, but in this instance the quality does not deteriorate. Our likelihood of forming acquaintances and friends in later years is very much less than in youth, and, certainly, with our habits and idiosyncrasies established, as they are after middle age, the possibility of forming intimate friendships is very much decreased. In childhood and youth, we are more imaginative and less practical, and, consequently, our inclinations in the line of friendships will be more natural and less influenced by considerations alien to friendship itself. Nothing can be more true than the axiom of Cicero, “Friendship does not follow upon advantage, but advantage upon friendship.” Clearly demonstrated as this is, but few people seem to realize it. For the fundamental truth at the bottom of this matter is, as he further states, “the basis of that steadfastness and constancy which we seek in friendship is sincerity. For nothing is enduring which is insincere.”

Of all virtues, sincerity is the greatest, yet, broadly speaking, how extremely rare! There is almost no trouble and pains which people will not take to make the world think that they are something other than they really are, when but a fraction of the cost might make them what they are trying to seem to be. The reciprocal relation of friendship demands sincerity, just in proportion as it becomes intimate, and this applies to all friendships, of whatsoever character.

The love of children is perhaps the greatest of all affections in the aggregate, because experience has not taught them to doubt and impugn the motives of others, since everything to them is just what it superficially appears to be. Our most violent heartaches come through dissimulation toward others, and nothing tends to make so callous and blunt our finer sensibilities as this. But just in proportion as we are sincere, must we be careful as to who arouses an interest of more than passing moment within us, as after affection is once started and nurtured into luxuriance, it is not within our power to control it. While love, when reciprocated, can afford an ecstasy and happiness, otherwise unknown, it can, also, when not returned by the object of our affection, become the most potent cause of superlative pain and anguish. The expression of this truth by the greatest of all English poets, would, in itself, make his name forever immortal had he never written another line, and constitutes not only the soundest philosophy, but the most sublime of all sentiments evolved from the human mind:

If all the race thoroughly understood the truth of these words, how much more happiness there would be in the world! It is our trifling with our affections, or the reckless manner in which we bestow them upon others, which causes us our deepest sorrows. In childhood, with ordinarily kind parents, we have such experiences as afford us pleasant memories throughout life, simply because we lived in accordance with nature’s law, which she makes easy for us at this age to follow, when we have no experience or reason by which we may be guided; but as we grow older, we form those habits of dissimulation which lead us into all sorts of trouble; simply because we can do certain things without our friends and acquaintances becoming cognizant of our actions, we are foolish enough to think that no harm can be done. If we would use our intelligence at all, we would see at once, that while it may be possible to deceive others in the matter of our thoughts and actions, we cannot delude ourselves. We would also realize that our actions and our thoughts are efficient causes in the making of our own characters. We would further see that in order to get any real enjoyment out of a friendship, of even the most Platonic kind, we must be able to play our part sincerely; in other words, we must be all that we attempt to make our friends think we are. The old proverb which tells us that we should go courting in our old clothes, is true in the largest sense in which we can apply it.

When we consider how much we are dependent upon our after-affections and their outcome for our happiness, we see that Coleridge resorted to no hyperbole when he wrote:

Nor did he overestimate the bearing which each and every act of our life has upon our ability to either love or to be loved, since it is only when we are capable of returning affection as pure and unsullied as is given us, that we achieve the acme of delight. It is on account of the necessity of the possession of these qualities which we have found to constitute the only possible basis for really lasting love, that we are so much interested in those of great affection. Emerson truly said that “all mankind loves a lover,” and equally valid is his observation that “Love is not for levity, but for the total worth of man.” It is the affection of any human being which constitutes his life and his friendships, both as living and when coming into his companionship, and when dead, as forming the memories upon which the imagination will fondly dwell, and that bring into his life whatever real satisfaction he may have. As a means of Æsthetic development, nothing is of higher value than the affections, and, as a stimulant for action along this line, they are without an equal. We have only to remember the story of Damon and Pythias, to see that the ancients fully realized the power of affection; or to read what Plato puts into the mouth of Phoedrus, when he has him say, “Love will make men dare to die for their beloved, and women as well as men.”

What we have noted, heretofore, refers to all affections. Now we come to the culmination of all affairs of friendship,—that relationship which is known as marriage. Upon the immensity of the importance of this ceremony have almost all of the religious ideas of man been built, and in many cases, if not in all, to the utter profanation of the thing itself.

In the old tribal civilization which prevailed, the idea of marriage was ill-defined, and it was only as the desire for the ownership of children grew that moral ideas in this relation became at all definite. The fact that men wished to leave to their children property and chattels, which they might not have the opportunity of disposing of satisfactorily before their death, brought about a desire for marriage upon the monogamous and monandrous basis; and the fact that man was the owner of the property, and that the wife, until recently, had no inherent right therein, made the matter of the ownership of the children of primal importance, so that the wishes of the father in regard to the inheritance might be fulfilled. It was on account of the supremacy of man in his own home that the family became the unit upon which the State is built, just as the male individual was the unit upon which the family was built, and citizenship was primarily evolved and applicable only to the male portion of the population, inasmuch as they were necessary to the State both as tax-payers and as warriors. This idea of the ownership of children enforced upon woman the moral code under which she lives in Occidental countries to-day; and, at the same time, and for the reasons above stated, kept man immune from it.

The significance attached to the sexual desire in this relationship is and has been greatly overestimated, to the greatest disadvantage of mankind at large. The most distinguishing feature about connubial affection as compared with Platonic friendship, is that in matrimony there is the added unification of the parties thereto, owing to the community of interest between them. Their individualities are merged into one another; their development must be along similar or parallel lines. Richter has given us a good account of what a man should select in the character of his wife “to whom he may be able to give readings concerning the more essential principles of psychology and astronomy without her bringing up the subject of his stockings in the middle of his loftiest and fullest flights of enthusiasm; yet he will be well content should one possessed of moderate excellencies fall to his lot—one who shall be capable of accompanying him, side by side, in his flights so far as they extend—whose eyes and heart may be able to take in the blooming earth and the shining heavens, in great, grand masses at a time, and not in mere infinitesimal particles; one for whom this universe may be something higher than a nursery or ball-room, and one who, with feelings delicate and tender, both pious and wide, will be continually making her husband better and holier.” Since the time of Jean Paul Richter, woman has been allowed educational advantages more nearly equal to those of her brothers than heretofore; and, as a consequence, in many instances and quite often, do we find the lady not only the better but the larger half of the home, intellectually.

As Geoffrey Mortimer has well shown, love among cultured people is largely dependent upon the imagination. In savages and in the human race, primarily, when at this period of their existence, it took the form of hedonism, or even the more gross sex-worship, and it was not until mankind was removed far from the brute that his imagination developed, and his mind was capable of abstract thought, that his Æsthetic nature began to develop. As his intellect became more profound, and his mental range wider, his power of abstract thinking was accordingly augmented, until to-day, with the average human being, love is only, in a restricted sense, dependent upon physical gratification. Herbert Spencer has given a very sure test of love, based upon its dependence upon the imaginative faculty. According to him, when we are absent from the one we love, the mental picture which we form of her, and the attributes which we at that time give her, are all found in her when in her actual presence. Then, we are really in love with the person whose faults we cannot see. The truth of the old adage, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” still further shows the part which the imagination plays in love. There is no human being who has been so fortunate as to marry the first object upon which his affections settled, providing, of course, that his previous life has been spent so that he can enter into this relationship equitably, who did not find that if his love was reciprocated, life possessed a transcendent charm which words cannot express. Such an affection is necessarily based upon a most profound respect, and can only continue when this deferential regard exists. While feeling a security in its sense of ownership of the one loved, yet it asks and demands nothing, and can only bud, blossom, and ripen into its fullness in the atmosphere of kindness and absolute liberty. While sensual gratification, in the earlier stages, has been the means of nature in perpetuating the species, it is also the most powerful factor in the evolution of that community of interest which is the very soul of this attachment. The infinite number of little incidents which are never to be forgotten by any real lover, are all of a purely physical nature, but, in the aggregate, they form the nucleus of that “amazement of love and friendship and intimacy” which is like the melodious harmony of the sweetest sounds, which lead us into an ecstasy in every way supersensual. It is in the realization of such delight that Gay remarks, “Not to know love, is not to live.”

We can best understand the real potency of sensual gratification in love, if we consider that those moments which are the subject of our most pleasant memories, are not those in which our desires were gratified, but those in which we ourselves practiced the most ascetic self-denial. Well has Schlegel expressed this sentiment when he says, in his essay upon the Limits of the Beautiful:—“Those who yield their souls captive to the brief intoxication of (sensual) love, if no higher and holier feeling mingle with and consecrate their dreams of bliss, will shrink tremblingly from the pangs which attend their awakening.” But nature has here so arranged her course, that after marriage, our children’s, or, in their absence, our lovers’ affairs, become a part and parcel of our lives, and thus, what began as selfish interest, from the pleasure which we obtain from the presence of our loved one, is transmuted into altruism of the highest type. To those who love, there is nothing of the spirit of boasting in the words of “Valentine,” when he says:

but rather of a pious appreciation of the being who has brought him such great happiness. There is something unaccountable about this passion called love, and anyone who has experienced it does not wonder at the words of Madame de Stael, “Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notions of time, effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end.”

In speaking of the happiness which is to be attained by means of love, we should not fail to note the fact that in order to secure the most enjoyment from it, we must be able to satisfy the conditions for which such a close and reciprocal relationship calls. It is here that the philosophy of living, based upon self-interest, is by far the safest guide of conduct known, since once the fact that we must be able to give to the ones whom we love all that we ask of them is instilled in our minds, we will have a most powerful stimulant to virtuous living. And in this matter, there is no chance for misunderstanding. If we would get all the happiness out of love, we must go into it according to the old injunction given to clients who were both about to try their case before a court in equity: “You must enter with clean hands.” It is strange, that even in the affairs of a Platonic friendship, a citizen of morally rotten Rome at the time of the decadence of the consulate, should realize that “Nothing is more amiable than virtue; nothing which more strongly allures us to love it,” and yet, two thousand years later, so few people are practicing this truth, and many, who, in their ignorance, will utterly deny it. This has largely come about from the fact that, in times past, man has been able to mold the opinions of his sisters, and, consequently, virtue was not demanded from him. But if we will teach our children that it is essential to their happiness that they should be virtuous, so that they may enter into an affair d’amour with equity, and obtain from it the happiness which it only can bring, we would sweep from their paths, with one stroke, the temptations of licentiousness which are to-day proving to be the ruin of the majority of the young men of this country. We should teach our boys that they must be able to give to their wives a mind and body as unpolluted by debauchery as they expect and insist upon receiving, and that unless they are able to do this, the pleasures of love, as it affects the marriage relationship, are forever beyond their power to experience. We should teach our girls that they should demand, from the man who asks for their hand, as clean and as spotless a past as they are able to give him, and that, unless they insist upon this, matrimony will not turn out to be the “grand, sweet song” which they have been told about, but will be more like an “armed truce.” Connubial love is of such a nature that it will not find happiness in the contemplation of the possibility of a rival, and of all of the exacting passions with which humanity has to deal, undoubtedly this of love is the strongest. The old saying that “familiarity breeds contempt,” is based upon this fact—that unless we are able to maintain, in the one we love, the esteem for us, which under a smaller knowledge of our individuality, we have excited, the sentiment of attraction soon turns to one of repulsion even more potent than its opposite, and even as great a source of misery as is the repulsion of hatred; not even being secondary when compared with jealousy, which “mocks the meat it feeds upon.” What possibility of happiness is there in marriage where there is constantly running through the mind a comparison of the partner which you have, and a possibility of what you have given up? How much happiness is possible when you are always comparing yourself with some rival, and wondering what your lover sees in him which you do not possess? It is the strongest argument in favor of monogamy and monandry, that only under this condition can the marriage relationship be equitably fulfilled, even more potent than the necessity of parental guidance in directing the development of the growing mind.

Man is, by nature, socially inclined, and it is only in the society of his fellow-men that he really matures intellectually and morally. Under the influence of love, in the most intimate association with a limited number of others, preferably of his own kin, who will reprove his faults gently and reasonably laud his courage and achievements—he finds the perfect element for inspiration and development. Holmes has expressed this sentiment beautifully in his lines:

The enthusiasm which comes from the struggle of maintaining a home for your loved ones, where privacy and comfort may be found; a retreat from the cares and trifling annoyances of the work-a-day world, makes the place of abode a shrine where all of our interests are centered. Most truly has Longfellow said:

Without having experienced a real and genuine affection, no man can realize the highest possibility. Edwin Markham has most truly said that the love adventure is the episode of every human life, and, without it, no existence is complete. There is no other earthly possession with which it can be compared; consequently, we cannot be too careful in seeing that our lives conform to the necessary demands of the nature of this passion. The effect of love upon human ethics cannot be doubted. The finest faculty which we have is that by means of which we are able to judge right from wrong, and is what we call conscience. With this truth in mind, we have only to remember a portion of an incomplete sonnet of Shakespeare’s, saying, “Conscience is born of love.”

In this observation, as in many of his others, the bard of Avon has reached the heart of the matter at once. Without love, we would have, and could have, no conscience, as we are only considerate of others when we have much at stake ourselves, and wish this consideration for reciprocal reasons. Had we no affection, we would have but little incentive to moral discrimination. In this sense, as well as for its happy memories,

In considering the advantages of real love, it is also important that the disadvantages of its counterfeits should be made clear. In the first place, many of the noted teachers during the last decade have called attention to the frightful reduction in our marriage and birth rates; and this, notwithstanding the fact that we feel that we are progressing upward in the scale of civilization. Now, while many of our political economists believe that the increased cost of living has been largely responsible for this, it seems that we should not, however, attach too great importance to the claim. There has been a growing of the moral sense among women of the Western nations, and particularly in America, during the last few years, which has tremendously influenced the foundations of our civilization. The Women’s Christian Temperance movement, under the guiding hand of Miss Willard, not only advocated the prohibition of the sale of alcoholic stimulants, but also became a tremendous power in the social purity crusade, which began to sweep over this country some twenty-five years ago. The agitation, which resulted from this reform movement, developed facts which were previously unknown to the general public, and in every way caused people to begin to think about subjects which had previously never been brought to their attention in a specific way. When the statistics were published that, in this country of eighty million people, we were having one divorce for every twelve marriages, and that every year showed a decrease in the marriage and birth rate, thinking people of all classes began to seek to find the cause for such facts.

It would seem that one of the primal causes for the decrease in the marriage rate is the ease with which vice has been allowed to become organized in this country into a regular system, which is conducted upon a basis of cold-blooded business calculation. The fact that we have between six hundred thousand and three-quarters of a million of prostitutes in America, and that this class of people is being recruited at the rate of over fifteen thousand per annum from foreign countries and about seventy-five thousand per annum from our own country, is certainly highly significant. Furthermore, the fact that probably three-quarters of the women in America who marry are forced to undergo major operations within the first five years of their married life, on account of the moral delinquency of their husbands, has certainly not given any impetus to marriage in our own country. We have also to remember that over one-third of all the blindness in this country is traceable to a like cause, and that this occurs in innocent children, who usually are less than a week old when their sight is lost, as the result of venereal infection. Furthermore, in many of the homes which we all have an opportunity to observe, there is not that happiness existing which would lead thinking people to rush ruthlessly into matrimony, and the necessity for making divorce easy and the marriage relationship hard to enter into was never as imperative as it is to-day. The majority of the children being born, and in whose hands the entire welfare of this state in the future will rest, are usually those of parents who are either unfitted or unable, physically, intellectually, and morally, to give them such character and education as will make them good citizens; in other words, vice and crime are breeding faster by far than moral restraint and virtue. Whenever we are able to have our young men understand that self-control on their part is a matter of first importance in the requirements of good citizenship, and a prime requisite if individual happiness is desired, then and only then will we begin to find marriage becoming more popular and divorce less to be desired by those who have entered into this relationship.