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THE TRUTH ABOUT MARRIAGE

failingly secure happiness. Why not be scientific in this matter as in every other of our day?

Marriage may be likened to buying a farm. Some people know how to buy a farm. They understand farming, and soil, and seed, and conditions that make farming successful.

The trouble with marriage is that most people who enter into it are as ignorant as most city people are of farming. They undertake to buy a farm without knowing any of the conditions governing success. They know nothing about land in general, about soils in particular, they know nothing of seed or planting or cultivation or harvesting or marketing, and all the many elements that go into successful farming. How can they make a success of it? Would we expect farming under such conditions to be anything else but a gamble?

And similarly how can we expect marriage to be a success when those who plan to enter it know nothing about the subject except that people get married, and that some are happy, and a great many others unhappy?

They have never studied themselves. They do not know what they are, what they like, what they want to do or be, except, in some vague way, to be happy. They do not know what kind of a person will make them happy. They do not study the people

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