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character or agreement in your tastes. All those influences 
on which we were foolish enough to imagine that our hap- 
piness depended have vanished under the new dispensation. 
Nay, even sentimentality and caprice must count as nothing 
in this most momentous affair of life for ever and a day. We 
have no will about the matter, either rational or otherwise ; 
and in thinking that we ever had, we have been under the 
fondest of delusions. Mr. Buckle informs us that, under this 
new dispensation, this great social and religious institution 
is not only swayed but is completely controlled by the price 
of food and the rate of wages,” and that “ the experience of 
a century in England proves that marriages have no connec- 
tion with personal feelings.” No sensible man will entertain 
a doubt that the number of marriages in any particular year 
is affected by the general prosperity of the country ; but one 
would have thought that the giving utterance to such a para- 
dox as that “ marriages have no connection with our personal 
feelings, and that this great social and religious institution is 
not only swayed but is completely controlled by the price of 
food and wages,” would have caused any man to pause and 
question the truth both of his principles and conclusions. If 
such has been Mr. Buckle's experience in the matter, I can 
only say that it flatly contradicts my own ; and as long as my 
powers of memory continue unimpaired, I shall reject the 
conclusion which Mr. Buckle draws from his statistics. I 
must again take refuge behind my former objection, that the 
statistics include the action of our individual wills, our likes 
and our dislikes, our sentimentalities and our fancies ; and 
they will only avail to prove Mr. Buckle's point when he has 
succeeded in eliminating every one of these out of the problem ; 
and when he has got rid of all these variables, his statistics 
will assume a different character, and we shall be able to go 
on in years to come as we have in those which are past. It is 
more than any one of us can believe, that we are bound by as 
iron a law in the matter of marriage as nature is by the 
doctrine of the parallelogram of forces ; and that neither free 
will nor caprice exerts any influence over this great social and 
religious institution. 
In a similar manner we are informed that the numbers of 
the letters lost in the post-office bear nearly the same ratio/ 
year by year, to the numbers of the population. What this 
has to do with proving the powerlessness of individual influence 
on the great total of human affairs I cannot tell. It very 
seldom happens that any of us drop a letter into the post- 
office with a bank-note in it without a direction, or putting our 
own name and address, deliberately and of set purpose. When 
