Marriages.—On 15 January, 1658, after reciting that "the Director General and Council not only are informed, but have even seen and remarked that some persons, after the proclamation and publication for the third time of their bans, or intention of marriage, do not proceed further with the solemnization of their marriage, as they ought, but postpone it from time to time, not only weeks, but some months, which is directly contrary to, and in contravention of, the good order and custom of our Fatherland:"
They enact that marriage must be solemnized within one month after the last publication, or appear in council and show cause:
And that "no man and woman shall be at liberty to keep house as married persons before and until they are lawfully married, on pain of forfeiting one hundred guilders, more or less, as their quality shall be found to warrant, and all such persons may be amerced anew therefor every month by the officer, according to the order and the custom of our Fatherland."
The Charms Of Nativity.
In this day, when a spirit of restlessness seems to have seized upon the various peoples of the world, and operates to produce great movements from one locality to another, or from one country to another, we propose to devote some pages to the discussion of this interesting subject. The world may be said to be grossly material; for surely no land of flowering beauty, however rich in the wealth of nature's charms, can, to a sentimental and spiritual soul, be at all comparable to those heavenly flowers of love which bloom in the vicinage in which we were reared. In leaving a cold and bleak country even, we may go to one where nature has stamped her own warmth, as she is sure to do, on the hearts of her inhabitants; but those scenes to which we were earliest used are, by far, dearer to the sensitive soul, than others which, in distant lands, crop out more gorgeously; and the playmates, the associates of our hearts, our early lives, even though it may be in the very chill and frost of barren rocks and dreary plains, are far dearer to us than the welcome of strangers, let it be as warm and as sunny as genial and glowing hearts can make it. The stranger, with soul, in a strange land, has fully felt the truth of these remarks. These are considerations which should operate powerfully with us to bind us to our homes and our own communities. But the benefits of staying at home, or of enlarging the area of "civilization" and of settlement but slowly, are not confined, by any means, to our feelings. To prevent the loneliness which we naturally feel in a strange country is not the only object to be gained by migrating, when we migrate at all, slowly, and but little at a time, (say a few miles only,) and by making our habitations as permanent as possible. There are, perhaps, weightier considerations, even, which should govern in the matter than the loneliness and the estrangement which we must suffer for years, when we make distant removals.
Home is, in its full meaning, a most heavenly word. It is a word that is allied with every principle of our natures. It is the nursery in which our spirits are trained. It is the seat of our religion and the abode of our loves. There can be to us but one home, that is, in the full sense of the term. And that home is a locality, a place, where, with the kindred ideas, elements, and social and spiritual partnerships of our earlier lives and beings, we can enjoy life pure and perfect as we at first received it. Any local or social estrangements from these pure elements of life, no matter how complete the surrounding appointments of comfort may seem to be which draw us away from them, do not constitute and make up the bulk of what, properly, is to the human spirit to be considered home.
The loss of home, then, by removal to a distance from those earlier scenes, localities, peoples, ideas, and customs of which we are a part, is a far greater loss to us, considered in the aggregate, than is at first apparent by any mere feelings of loneliness or estrangement which we may suffer in a strange community. Because, while these feelings undoubtedly indicate to us the part of our lives with which we have parted in leaving those scenes and associations of which we were a part, they do not always reflect back to us the painful vacuum which is created at home by our absence; and therefore, our feelings are not always an accurate measurement of the full injury done by the detaching of human elements from their proper places, to be thereafter located in strange and distant lands. And it may properly be said that the suffering of these feelings by those who have removed is not the greatest injury done by such removals. For, while feelings represent some of the injury done to us by such removals, they certainly do not represent all of it. The strongest powers of a man, naturally considered, are in the locality or in the society in which he was raised. He may, in distant communities, where social life is just taking root, or where, indeed, it has already taken root, be, to outward appearances, a more prominent person than at home, where he was raised. He may be called into public life oftener, and be made to assume offices of trust which at home he never would have assumed, and, perhaps, never could have assumed. But, after all, he is really not so important a personage in his new locality, and in his new offices, as he would have been at home in his natural offices. This statement may appear, to some minds, paradoxical. But it really is not so, examined by the light and the law of uses and of natural adaptations. We shall not go into any extended discussion, however, of this particular question, but we shall assume, at the outset, that the circle of "civilization" or of settlement, should be but slowly and gradually enlarged. There are a great many strong reasons for this plea of widening and enlarging the circle of "civilization" or of settlement. The same reasons which operate to show that no single individual can be as useful (in the scale of nature) in a community distant and remote from his birthplace, as he could in serving out his natural uses in his birthplace, will operate equally to show that such distant removals are not healthy for whole communities of people. Our border States, some of which are very far out from the centres of settlement, have been peopled by persons leaving the older and denser communities where they were born and raised, and repairing to these new "settlements." The effect of it has been, in many instances, to change the wheel of individual fortune, and to place some in high positions who, in their native communities, would never have reached those positions. But we shall argue that this result has not always been beneficial to the parties so elevated. The natural growth of communities, that is, the growth by enlarging the circle of settlement but slowly and connectedly, is sustained by every healthy law of economy. Even in the gross matter of material wealth, the bulk of the people are better off in an old than in a new community. We venture the assertion that this remark will hold good even as between the outer border States of the West, and the inhabitants of those countries from whose populations these States have, in a large measure, been settled. But it will especially hold true as between the people of those outer border States and the people of a corresponding class of our older States.
But what is the moral exhibit? What do the facts here prove? They prove, incontestably, that the standard of law, of morals, of religion, and of society, in all the vast multitude of its meaning, is, in the "new settlements," incomparably below what it is in the old communities. These are grave proofs, and of importance enough, in our judgment, to settle a national policy against the building up of new communities at great distances from the old ones.
If it were physically possible to detach one half of the territory of an old state, and to send the detached portion, with its entire population, to some distant and remote country, and there locate it, even this huge mass of matter and of peoples would greatly suffer by the shock of the new situation. The earth has its affinities as well as people have theirs, and no considerable portion of the earth (that is, if such a thing were possible at all) could be detached from its proper place, where all of its connections are natural and healthy, and could be transported to another portion of the globe where the materials and the fashions of nature are not exactly of the same kind, without suffering by the change. How much more, then, will human beings, who are more subject to influences, suffer by a corresponding change? The laws of affinity and of sympathy must be preserved in the commonest things even; and if such a change as we have spoken of were possible in any considerable portion of the earth's surface, the peoples carried along with the detached portion would, for a time, have the same laws, the same customs, the same religions—would see the same scenery, and would, to some extent, breathe the same air to which they had all along been accustomed; but, in the course of time, they would find themselves laboring and struggling in full sympathy with the earth so detached for sympathy with the new objects and new external surroundings of the new situation, until a perceptible change would take place in their feelings, and in the very ardor of their religious worships.