This is a fourth method: read aloud of characters like Arden, Romeo, or Abelard, or Paul and Virginia, and make your comments audibly. You will not be long in tracing a conclusion. Be a little ingenious about it, find out through your sister. Prepare the way and don’t ask until you find she is unpledged, remember; or at least tarry long enough to be reasonably certain. And what if refused? No harm done. Like the German’s sugar, “The other pound is shust so good as the first one.”
One man I know drew off a list of all his acquaintances worthy of marriage, and went about it like a regular wheat-buyer. He was a bachelor, of course, and very eccentric. Coming to the first, he explained his object, concealing all names, but saying she was first of a long list furnished him by a friend (each one was first, always); then he would say, “I will give you a week to consider it, and no harm done; if not then, I must pursue my list further.” Of all the sold-out men, he was sold the cheapest! He married a whole family. The first two were disgusted, the third or fourth accepted. This looks too much like a purchase and sale, and don’t try the method.
The last way is sensible; by writing—many a proposal is in writing. Even in that be a little guarded; once a no, yeses come with reluctance. It is best not to give one an opportunity to say no, but to parry long enough to test the opposition. If it were a race-horse to buy, a house to contract for, or a block to purchase, it would not be very hard to strike a bargain. So that, once finding form, character, fitness, affection, desire to be mated, go about the rest by a direct and sensible method, and don’t wear out the gate-hinges, burn out all the oil, weary the old folks, or turn gray with anxiety, but do it.
Don’t marry a drunkard. He will promise, by all that’s good, great, and holy, to reform. How many more like him have made just such promises? He can’t keep such a promise if he would. Make him reform a couple of years at least, on trial, before you marry him. It will be time enough then to risk a life-partnership, to chain your hopes to an unfortunate creature whose sense and judgment are corrupted, not by will, perhaps, but by habit stronger than reason. With most men this habit becomes a desire. They are bound to feed the fire that burns them. They have no voice in the matter, and cannot, if they would, break the strong fetters that bind them in irons, like the prison bars confine their victims.
It’s a sorry picture to behold a fair young girl chained to a being with a will all lost and debauched in appetite for drink; a section of the land of departed evil spirits can only equal her daily misery. Children must bear it, friends submit to it, and all of character, sweetness of temper, or refinement in one’s nature will revolt at the coarseness of the wrecked and wretched career of a drunkard’s life. He is an object of pity, and a being to be shunned in matrimony, no matter how many promises he makes or how good he is otherwise.
To avoid long sorrow, disgrace, and regret, avoid him. If you had two lives and one to dispose of, at any cost, mate with a drunkard and die a thousand deaths. Your health, peace, and happiness will go with his.
“Art thou mated with a clown,
Then the baseness of his nature
Will have weight to drag thee down.”
Such a man will kill his wife, burn his own child, sacrifice everything on earth when scourged by this degrading passion. More could be urged, but let the starving families, the criminal courts, the idiotic children, tell the rest: the story is too dreadful to dwell upon. It is monstrous. Life becomes a burden, and death a sweet release from such a cross. Of all the matches on earth, the most to be dreaded and avoided is the drunkard’s wife.