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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: impersonal France practise this method of marital selection, their
conseils de famille furnishing in some sort a parallel. But, as is
well known, matrimony among these same upper classes is largely form
devoid of substance. It begins impressively with a dual ceremony,
the civil contract, which amounts to a contract of civility between
the parties, and a religious rite to render the same perpetual,
and there it is too apt to end.
So much for the immediate influence on the man; the eventual effect
on the race remains to be considered. Now, if the first result be
anything, the second must in the end be everything. For however
trifling it be in the individual instance, it goes on accumulating
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