We know women who refrain from marrying to keep out of trouble. The old saying is, that every sigh drives a nail in one's coffin. They are not going to worry themselves to death bearing children and nursing them! It is too great a risk, too much suffering. How often have we been told this! Yet how false the reasoning is! Very carefully prepared statistics show that between the ages of twenty and forty-five years, more unmarried women die than married, and few instances of remarkable longevity in an old maid are known. The celebrated Dr. Hufeland, therefore, in his treatise on the _Art_ _of Prolonging Life_, lays it down as a rule, that to attain a great age, one must be married.
As for happiness, those who think they can best attain it outside the gentle yoke of matrimony are quite as wide of the mark. Their selfish and solitary pleasures do not gratify them. With all the resources of clubs, billiard-rooms, saloons, narcotics, and stimulants, single men make but a mock show of satisfaction. At heart every one of them envies his married friends. How much more monotonous and more readily exhausted are the resources of woman's single life! No matter what 'sphere' she is in, no matter in what 'circle' she moves, no matter what 'mission' she invents, it will soon pall on her. Would you see the result? We invoke once more those dry volumes, full of lines and figures, on vital statistics. Stupid as they look, they are full of the strangest stories; and what is more, the stories are all true. Some of them are sad stories, and this is one of the saddest: Of those unfortunates who, out of despair and disgust of the world, jump from bridges, or take arsenic, or hang themselves, or in other ways rush unbidden and unprepared before the great Judge of all, _nearly two-thirds_ are unmarried, and in some years nearly _three-fourths_. And of those other sad cases--dead, yet living--who people the madhouses and asylums, what of them? Driven crazy by their brutal husbands, do you suggest? Not at all! In France, Bavaria, Prussia, Hanover, four out of every five are unmarried; and throughout the civilised world there are everywhere three or four single to one married woman in the establishments for the insane, in proportion to the whole number of the two classes above twenty-one years of age.