A MATERIMONIAL EXPERIMENT.

Observer, Volume 9, Issue 524, 5 January 1889, Page 3

A MATERIMONIAL EXPERIMENT.

The Americans, or some of lhf>m, to be precise, are determined that t lie rerent discussion on marriage in the London T< U<ir>ipii shall have some practical result. To this end tin; experimenters propose to marry young people ' on probation ' for three months, during which time they fire to live in ail respects save ore like wan and wife. Edwin is to be at liberty to admonish Angelina when she doe& anything displeasing to him, to lecture her. to have a voice in the selection cf her pastners at a dance, or even to prohibit her i'iom dancing altogether. And Angelina, for her part, is to he at liberty to insist upon j Edwin's giving up smoliiDg, swearing, seeing girls home and other amusements. And if at the end cf the quarter the young couple find they like this sort of thing then i hoy are to be regularly tied up, and live together in the ordinary way. ■x * # Thif is not altogether a bad idea. During the probationary period the young people wiil have many opportunities of seeing each ether and of gaining some insight into each other's real character. Such opportunities under the existing order of things but rarely present themselves. How can they? Edwin meets Angelina in the ball-room or at the dinner table and exchanges a little society small talk with her of the usual vapid kind. How does ha know what kind of a wife she will make ? How can she tell what kind of a hubby he will be ? If his income is small and he wants ' a working wife,' what must his disgust be on discovering after marriage that his wife knows positively nothing whatever about housekeeping ? And as for her, what must her disgust be to disoover that the soft spoken and assiduous ' masher ! she thought too charming for anything before marriage is an empty-headed noodle and a domestic tyrant? # * *• Bill Nye contributes a characteristically humorous sketch on the marriage question to the New York World:— ■' My life is utterly and entirely wrecked because 1 am too tame for my wife. She yearns for a ferocious man, and I cannot be such. I have tried repeatedly to do something which would shock Society from centre to circumference ; but Society only laughed and pointed cut something in its midst that was so j much worse than anything I had eve* 1 done that I felt ashamed of myself. If I had my life to live over again, instead of gelling an education and learning habits of industry and economy, I would roll up my pantaloons and wade in »varm blood. I would also be a gay Lothario aud

socially as crooked aB possible, so as to have*a spicy record. Then I would woo several young women in different States and marry them, for certainly there is a class of girl 3 that take very little interest in one who seeks to conform to the spirit of the Ten Commandments.' * * ' That is Bill's peculiar way of pointing a moral, and adorning a newspaper article. The moral is : ' Look before you leap.' To return to the American idea, I shall await ' fresh developments ' with interest.