LEAP YEAR AHEAD.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19833, 31 December 1927, Page 11

LEAP YEAR AHEAD.

THE LADIES' PRIVILECE.

AN OLD SCOTTISH LAW.

TAX UPON THE BACHELORS.

With 1928 now close at hand, a daily newspaper like the Herald may be excused for reminding its spinster readers that the New Year will also be leap-year. Bachelors, of whatever age, are equally entitled to be told, although whether as a warning or not is for them individually to decide.

Old customs are tumbling in scores nowadays. The bishops propose to remove St. Valentino from the Anglican calendar as a merely mythical person. Some are unkind enough to say the modern miss has no need of the leap-year 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 the length of "popping the question" herself. Mr. Arnold Bennett warns the young man of to-day to beware lest, when he thinks he is choosing, he is, in fact, being chosen.

Mr. H. 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 maidenly tears on his 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 as was given in Scotland in 1288, under the titular queen, Margaret, "the Maid of Norway." It was then enacted that "it is statut and ordaint that during tho rein of hir maisfc blissit Megeste, for ilk yeare knowno as lepe yeare, ilk mayden ladye of bothe liigho and lowe estait shall, hae liberte to bespeke ye man she likes, albeit ho refuses to taik hir to be his lawful wyfe, he shall be mulcted in ye sum ano pundis or less, as his estait may be; except and awis gif he can make it appeare that 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 Scottish 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 straight-' out tax in some cases—that of the goodlooking and generally eligible bachelor, for example. Its results do not seem to have been put on record, nor yet 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 1