There are, also, deeper matters than these to be considered. Is this man or this woman worthy of lifelong devotion? Is the love he offers or she offers in return for the love you offer, the love that gives or the love that merely takes? Has he been a success at something, anything, that counts? Has he a sense of responsibility in marriage and the burdens it brings? Does he desire a home? Do his views as to children reflect man's natural desire to found a family or merely the selfish desire for the freedom and luxury which the absence of children may make possible? Has he a right to approach fatherhood--is his body physically and morally clean?
[Illustration: Copyright by Underwood & Underwood COLONEL AND MRS. ROOSEVELT WITH MEMBERS OF THEIR FAMILY Colonel Roosevelt's own family was preëminently one in which the father shared with the mother a keen sense of the responsibilities of marriage and the highest ideals of home life]
These are serious questions with which to weight the wings of a young man's or a young woman's fancy. But the attraction which cannot stand before them is not safe as a basis for marriage. Many a young man or woman has willfully turned closed eyes to the selfishness or the irresponsibility which will later wreck a home, because attraction blinded common sense.
Barter, the lowest form of marriage, exists and has always existed whenever the material benefits that either husband or wife expects to derive from the connection are the impelling forces in the union. The woman desires wealth, social position, a title--or perhaps nothing more than security from poverty or the necessity of work outside the home, or perhaps no more than the mere security of a home itself. The man in other cases desires wealth, or social position, or a wife who will grace his fine home, or some business connection which the marriage will afford. And upon these things men and women build, or attempt to build, the foundations of home life.
It is not true of course that every girl of moderate means, or without means, who marries a man of wealth does so because of his money. Nor is it always true when the cases are reversed. Love may be as real between those two as between any others. But when it is true that the marriage is an exchange of commodities, it is no different from prostitution under other circumstances. In fact, it is prostitution under cover, without acceptance of the stigma which for centuries has been the portion of voluntary selling of the body to him who cares to buy.