LEAP YEAR AHEAD

Hawera Star, Volume XLVII, 7 January 1928, Page 9

LEAP YEAR AHEAD

THE LADIES' PRIVILEGE

WITH, the commencement of the year " ](>2B the daily newspaper may be excused for reminding its spinster.readers that .the "New ""Year ' will also be leap-year. Bachelors, of whatever age, I are equally entitled to be told, although whether as a warning or net is for them individually to decide. Old customs are. tumbling in scores nowadavs. The bishops propose to remove St. Valentine from the Anglican calendar as a merely mythical person. Sonic arc unkind enough to say the modern miss has no need of the leapyear privilege —that she makes every year a leap-year. Certain commentators on twentieth century society will have it that woman never, needs to go to lie lcngh of “popping he question” herself. Mr Arnold Bennett ova ins the young man of to-dav to beware lest, when he thinks he is choosing, he is, in fact, being eliosen. Mr FI. L. Mencken, who is regarded as the leading American cynic, sums up the situation thus: ‘‘The average man does not marry because some marble fair one challenges his enterprise. He marries because chance throws into his way a fair one who repels him less actively than most, and because his delight, in what he thus calls her charm is reinforced by a growing suspicion that she has fallen in love with him. In brief, it is chivalry that undoes' him. The girl who infallibly gets a husband —in fact, any husband that she wants —is the one who tracks him boldly, fastens him with sad eyes, and then, when his conscience has begun to torture him, throws her arms around his neck, bursts into maid only tears on ms shoulder, and tells him that she fears her forwardness will destroy his respect for her. It is only a colossus who can resist such strategy.

Perhaps it would be otherwise if the gentler sex could rely upon statutory support such a s was given in Scotland in 1288, under the titular queen, Mnrgarct, “the Maid of Norway.” It was then enacted that ‘‘it is statut and ordaint that- during the rein of hir maist blissit Megeste, for ilk yeare known as lepe yeare, ilk mayden ladve of botlie highe* and lowe estait shall hae -oorte to beapeke ye man .she lines, albeit lie refuses to taik hir to be his lawful wyfe, he shall be mulcted in ye sum ane pundis or less, as his estait may be; except and awis gif he can make it appeare th'at he is betrothit ane ither woman then he shall be free.”

Margaret can scarcely be put forward as the feminist author of the law enacted in her name, for she did not cross the North Sea until 1290, and died in Orkney the same year, aged 17. The custom is believed to have had an earlier origin, although history is silent on the subject. It was perpetuated in France and Northern Italy in the middle ages, but afterwards ceased to have legal sanction. The fjeottish law was in effect a tax on bachelors, although whether the fine went to the rebuffed lady or into the State’s coffers is not clear. It. must have been a good deal more severe than a straightout. taxin some -cases —that of the good-looking and generally eligible bachelor, for example. Its results do not seem to have been put on record, not vet the reasons for enacting it. Perhaps the Church desired on general principles that the people should be fruitful and multiply, and the State wanted fighting men to defend its borders.

Will it be left to Mussolini, who now taxes bachelors, to revive the old Scottish and Italian law in these times?