THE IDEAL HUSBAND.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 11783, 12 October 1901, Page 5 (Supplement)

THE IDEAL HUSBAND.

It is a mistake to suppose that the ideal husband is the handiwork of the ideal wife. He is not. He is a species, distinct, rare, coveted, and not dependent for fundamental principle upon the woman he marries. In witness whereof is the established hopelessness of marrying a man to reform him ; and likewise the not infrequent instance of a thoroughly noble and unselfish husband with a most unworthy wife. The ideal husband is the direct result, first, of his mother's training; second, of his early environment and the character and habits that environment has created: and third, of the progressive decade in which he has developed, a decade of higher standards, greater requirement, and magnificent fulfilment. The ideal husband is essentially a twentieth-century innovation. The virtues which make him ideal were not virtues in the past. His liberality would have shocked his ancestors; his attitude of equality toward the sex of his mother would have wounded their vanity, and his wholesome unselfishness, resulting from these virtues, and acting like leaven in the loaf of marital happiness, would have taught them lessons filled with greater spiritual truth and beauty than orthodox creeds and Puritan customs.

One hundred years ago men and women knew bub little of each other. Women feared and obeyed their husbands; men protected and directed their wives. Woman's work was limited to housework and the needle, which occupations had nothing in common with the ambitions of men. Woman's education was limited by inferior and incomplete schooling facilities, with sometimes a course on the melodeon, to make her amusing. Woman had no legal status after marriage. When she dropped her name for her husband's she dropped all individuality, relinquishing her rights to hold property, to collect any wages she might earn, to govern the lives of the children she might bear. Can women be censured if, confined in a measure already too small, they did not grow? Can we marvel that they did not idealise when even the practical was beyond their reach? Could they have climbed to the heights with every means of ascent shut off, while men, who made the laws of society and State, refused to place the steps for them?

And who were the great losers by these conditions? Our forefathers ! If their wives had been their helpmates, instead of their housekeepers; their equals, rather than their inferiors; intellectually matched with them, rather than outclassed— the bond of sympathy that welds together on a common basis the ideal married man and woman of to-day had sweetened and uplifted the marriage relations of those pioneer days, creating the perfect understanding that results in mutual benefit and strength—what strifes might not have been saved, what suffering spared, what good increased, what progress hastened! And what a generation the present might have been, with its birthright of perfect harmony and its motherhood of splendid, competent women! The ideal wife does not make the ideal husband. When man reaches a marriageable age his habits have taken firm root, and his tendencies are so closely knit they admit of little stretching. But the ideal wife has a great deal to do with the ideal husbands of the future; for mothers are the women who make men. To them comes the responsibility of laying the cornerstone for future homes or the mockeries of homes. To them comes the opportunity to bend the twig while it is tender, and start it firm and straight on its upward growth. The ideal mother gives to her sons a heritage of mental, physical, and spiritual health, and devotes her energies, during their childhood, to developing that heritage to the full extent. First she teaches them the value of physical health, for this very practical branch of an ethical training is the rock on which the ideal rests. No chronic dyspeptic ever made an ideal husband; and no sufferer from gout ever maintained the moderate temperament essential to the father who would be an example to his sons. Physical health is the soil from which spring flowers of mental and spiritual loveliness. From it grow, with a luxuriant naturalness which cultivation cannot bring, cheerfulness, selfcontrol, truth, faith, generous impulse, and poise in the judgment of human nature and human motives. The mother who neglects to develop either the physical health of her children or to impress upon them its importance does not fulfil the duty which parenthood demands, and lays up for herself, for them and for their future families, misery and disappointment.— Hart in the Cosmopolitan (U.S.).