The statistics of marriages, as compared with those of population, would seem to indicate that there is an increasing unwillingness on the part of men or women, or both, to take upon themselves the responsibilities of wedded life. Whether because of the increased expense of living due to the development of luxurious tastes, and the selfishness which results; or the difficulties in the way of securing remunerative and constant employment; or because of other reasons, the sly god seems to have lost something of his former power. Perhaps the chief cause lies with the young men, who dare neither to face the cares of matrimony themselves, nor to ask others to do so. Whatever there is of cowardice in this matter, we do not believe that it can, as a rule, be charged upon the women of America, without regard to their station in life. It is claimed that in Massachusetts, of every 1,000 inhabitants in 1850-1860, 21 married, now only 17; that in Connecticut, while the population has increased 56 per cent during the last decade, marriages have increased but 34 per cent; that in Providence, R.I., while the number capable of marrying was in the last decade 115 percent greater than in the decade preceding the war, the number who married was only 77 per cent greater; and that in Ohio, while, in 1850-1880, the inhabitants had increased 37 per cent, the number of marriages had advanced only 26 per cent.
Mistakes go in pairs. It was a mistake for a body of Protestant ministers to meddle in the matter of the succession to a generalship in the army, and it is a mistake for the Catholic Standard to make this the occasion for invidious statements in reference to the service of Catholics in the late war. “Never,” it says, “was any company or any regiment or brigade that entwined on its colors emblems of the Catholic faith, and on the eve of a battle knelt to receive absolution from a Catholic priest, recorded but as first to advance and last to retreat. And since then, whether in barracks or in camp, ... you look in vain for any disgraceful record of Catholic privates and officers.” We submit that neither caste nor class nor sect has any place in determining the relative merits of the brave soldiers who fought in the Civil War. In camp, and upon the field of battle, they stood side by side, not as New Yorkers, Vermonters, Germans, Irishmen, Catholics, or Protestants, but as patriotic Americans. Some of these, perhaps, were better soldiers because they were devout Catholics, and others because they were earnest Presbyterians or Methodists, and this for the reason that those who fear God are the readier to face duty, brave danger, and die for country. No: our army is not an army of Catholics, Baptists, etc., but an army of Americans.
Is it true that “a very large part of our free education system is devoted to teaching the principles of Nihilism, the absurdities of evolution, the crudities of the nineteenth-century philosophy, weakest and most watery of all the philosophies of the ages”? Dr. William C. Prime makes this claim in the New-York Journal of Commerce, and then says, “Of what use it is to read the Bible in the morning, and teach in the afternoon that the Bible is a poor fiction, perhaps some one can explain. That this is precisely what many common schools and free educational institutions are doing, may be discovered with little difficulty.” With due deference to the opinion of our genial confrère, we cannot accept his conclusions. We have yet to learn of any public school in which flouting at the Bible or religion enters into the matter of instruction, and we apprehend that the number of teachers who thus misuse their office really constitutes so small a fraction of the teaching community as to be hardly worthy the learned doctor’s attention. As a matter of fact, by far the greater number of American teachers in public schools and private schools, whatever their faults otherwise, are men and women who are either Christians, or filled with a reverent regard for the Bible and its teachings.
When Daniel Webster was a youth of eighteen, in college, he wrote to a friend these suggestive words: “I am fully persuaded that our happiness is much at our regulation, and that the ‘Know thyself’ of the Greek philosopher meant no more than rightly to attune and soften our appetites and passions till they should symphonize like the harp of David.”
Perhaps no one ever paid a finer tribute to conscience than John Adams, when, after advising his son John Quincy to preserve above all things his innocence, he said, “Your conscience is the minister plenipotentiary of God Almighty in your heart. See to it that this minister never negotiates in vain.”