With wine gone, a “powerful” incentive to excessive “good fellowship” has been removed. With equal suffrage a fact, girls will unconsciously resent extreme impositions on their fine comradeship. There is certain to be a good natured reaction on a part of the ladies. They are going to set new standards. Not by law; by sweet common sense. Femininity will never revert to prudery, but girls are going to amend sensibly that “go-as-far-as-you-like” policy of good fellowship so that men will realize girls are less common and more wonderful than ever before.
And, we repeat, we’ll like it.
Go to it, girls! Make us be good!
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An Ohio editor allows that a man in Columbus got himself into a ton of trouble by marrying two women without the formality of divorce from the first. A Western observer points out that a good many men in that section had gotten that way by marrying just one. A Southern editor has retorted by alleging that quite a few of his friends found trouble enough by merely promising to marry without going any further. And an old doughboy friend of ours collected a goodly surplussage of grief when he was simply found in company with another man’s wife.
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If two souls are happily mated, there is no reason why either should live in or refer to the past. Their Eden is in the present and the future of what may be and not what has been. The man or woman should be sacredly silent about the dead past, unless there is some person or something which sooner or later may rise to bring darkness or death. The Bible basis of marriage is a love which takes for better or worse the heart which it calls its own. People ought not to marry unless they are so devoted to each other that any later knowledge of what either may have been or done would make no difference.
Man’s inhumanity to woman is often earthly, selfish and devilish. Women are naturally and generally better than men. If they err, it is usually the man’s fault. The average young man is fortunate to secure any girl to live with him as his wife. Keep still and ask no questions is the wise way. There is no double moral standard for speech or silence for man or woman. At the marriage altar, heaven demands no more of the woman than of the man. That a woman should tell the past to a man who insists, though it is none of his business, or that she should persist in confessing to him when he does not care to hear it, is a piece of folly of which some women are guilty. Where ignorance is bliss “’tis folly to be wise.” After marriage it will do no good to tell what you said and did before. There are many homes now happy, as if made under the wings of the angels, whose members at one time left the paradise of innocence and wandered beneath a roofless world.
Love is blind. A true and genuine lover does not want to hear a girl’s past; and if he did hear it from her own or another’s lips, it would make no difference to him. If any one is to tell let it be the man, for usually it is the woman and not he who runs the risk of a past. Let the man confess who places the material above the mental and moral and thinks of a wife as a cheap luxury, and of home as a dry-dock of repairs. No matter how greatly discrowned, a woman may be recrowned. With her, heaven is in the future and not in any past, she may serve, give, work and pray with the love that is the crown jewel in her diadem.