FALLING IN LOVE 



AN ancient and famous human institution is in pressing 

 danger. Sir George Campbell has set his face against the 

 time-honoured practice of Falling in Love. Parents innu- 

 merable, it is true, have set their faces against it already 

 from immemorial antiquity ; but then they only attacked the 

 particular instance, without venturing to impugn the insti- 

 tution itself on general principles. An old Indian adminis- 

 trator, however, goes to work in all things on a different 

 pattern. He would always like to regulate human life 

 generally as a department of the India Office ; and so Sir 

 George Campbell would fain have husbands and wives 

 selected for one another (perhaps on Dr. Johnson's principle, 

 by the Lord Chancellor) with a view to the future develop- 

 ment of the race, in the process which he not very 

 felicitously or elegantly describes as 'man-breeding.' 'Pro- 

 bably,' he says, as reported hi Nature, ' we have enough 

 physiological knowledge to effect a vast improvement in 

 the pairing of individuals of the same or allied races if we 

 could only apply that knowledge to make fitting marriages, 

 instead of giving way to foolish ideas about love and the 

 tastes of young people, whom we can hardly trust to choose 

 their own bonnets, much less to choose in a graver matter 

 in which they are most likely to be influenced by frivolous 

 prejudices.' He wants us, hi other words, to discard the 

 deep-seated inner physiological promptings of inherited 

 instinct, and to substitute for them some calm and dis- 



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