A MALE VIEW OF MARRIAGE.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume IX, Issue 7, 13 February 1892, Page 153

A MALE VIEW OF MARRIAGE.

N a forcible article on the difficulty experienced by marriageable women in getting husbands, the London Rtfrrtt, after pointing oat that the present tuonogatiiic system of marriage embodies the triumph of woman in civilisation, and showing that though I Christianity has helped woman to secure the exclusive right and interest in the

father of her children, she would have attained it all the same under Paganism, proceeds thus :— • While the men have been occupied with their polities, arte, and sciences, the women have been slowly improving and consolidating their position inch by inch. V 3 e have been too good-natured and too chivalrous to attempt to wrest their advantage firm them, and the result is what we see—that marriage is an institution with almost indissoluble bonds and far-reaching responsibilities, all designed in the interests of the weaker party to the contract. • Well, having got matrimony into its present condition, how do the women work it! Being strong, are they merciful ? I think married men will agree that the tendency is to work the system with considerable rigour. There must be no late nights at the dub, no unusual expenditure of monev that accounted for, no polite attentions to a strange lady. I have even heard of an agitation against latchkevs, tobacco in the drawing-room, lazing on Sunuay afternoons, and other entirely innocent forms of masculine indulgence. The modern theory of marriage, of course, is that the wife, having drawn a husband out of the lottery, stands watch and ward over him so as to keep at a distance all possible rivals. This position men have tacitly accepted, and if matrimony meant this, and only this, tnere would not perhaps be so much fault to find' with it. But the woman, as we have seen, is inclined to push her advantage to the verge of tyranny. To return to the commercial metaphor, she sets a very high price upon marriage indeed. For the helpless man who becomes involved in it it is too often a state of continued self-denial, verging upon privation. Ido not mean in the money sense exclusively, though that also has to be considered, but as regards tne general amenities of life. Now, commercially, you cannot legitimately run up the price of an article without giving value for it. If you do not give value for it you must take the risk of the article remaining on your han-is, and this is just the point, it seems to me, at which we have arrived in this marriage question. The average young man who puts his head in the matrimonial noose renounces (1) the employment of a considerable portion of a slender income, (2) a good many of his customary evening pastimes, (3) the oeligbts of indiscriminate larking with the young persons of his acquaintance. And, in return for this what does he obtain ? (1) A home which is not much better, although considerably dearer, than the one previously furnished him by his landlady ; (2) the companionship of a wife who, with her newly-acquired airs of authority, has ceased to be as nice as the unattached young ladies of his acquaintance, all of whom were wont to buzz around him like a fly in a jam tart; and (3) the paternity of children, a boon which many authorities in these Malthusian times are inclined to view askance. Is the bargain an altogether desirable one for the average young man ? The women may shout • Yes,’ in chorus until they are black in the face, but, meanwhile, the average young man, who is the other party to the bargain, shakes bls head and walks away. In commercial language, he is not taking it on.

* Lt is a matter of common observation that if men do not fall into matrimony in the callow period of the eaily twenties they take a run of bachelorhood till they are forty or more, and in a good many cases never marry at ail. There mast be something wrong with a system which, while it entraps unwary youths, tends to repel the man who is fully arrived at years of discretion. No amount of theorising about the blessedness of the married state will do away with this significant fact, that among men, after two or three-and twenty, the marriage curve declines, not to rise again until they are getting into the sere and yellow. The conclusion clearly to be drawn is, that for men with all their wits about them, and in the prime of life, marriage, as at present organised, is not usually thought to be good enough. They find it rather a one-sided bargain, and they will have none of it until they begin to want gruel o’ nights, when the wife comes in handy as a sort of confidential nurse. The cry is not that women want to marry more than they used to do, but that men want to marry less. Every woman still wants a husband, but every man does not nowadays want a wife. Commercially speaking, wives ask too much for themselves, and the marriage market in emsequenee is dull. For it does not matter whether you pay for an article in hard cash or in self-denial, you pay for it all the same.

• Matchmaking is no longer a question of bringing two congenial souls together. It is almost synonymous with trickery, and the reason is that it is hardly conducted upon fair principles, the young man being often lured into an alliance from which his better judgment, if left to itself, would probably recoil. I was discussing this question the o her day with a marriageable young man of about thirty—rich, cultured, and idle, and living in a fashionable fiat in the West-end, where he is waited upon hand and foot by •ervante. Many have been the attempts male to capture this desirable busband in posse. To me he talked of them with undisguised amusement. “ I was nearly caught once,” he said, “ but that was some years ago. I was actually engaged for about a week. At "the end of that time, thank Heaven, we had our first quarrel, my Dulcinea and I, and I took devilish good care that it should be the last. All the time I was engaged I felt I had been let into doing a foolish thing." “ And now T” I enquired. “ Ah, now," he replied, “lam a bit wiser. Yon won't catch me at that sort of thing in a hurry. In vain is the net spread in the sight of the bird. Look at me,” he added, •• why should I marry ? I have everything I want-” This is not an exceptional case, and the more's the pity. London is full of such young men. They are not all rich or idle, but they are all pretty niuch of the same way of thinking. They Lave practically everything that they deem it worth while to live for. When they come to be fifty, perhaps some of them will reconsider their position ; but, meanwhile, the women they ought to have married will have been stranded in old-maiden-hood.

* The only remedy for this state of things is to cheapen marriage —in other words to make it more attractive. Women have screwed up the bond so tight that it is in many cases irksome to bear. This bond most somehow be loosened so as to allow a healthy amount of play for masculine idiosyncrasies. lam not prepared to say exactly bow the thing is to be done, or what is the best way of doing it; but, in a general way, it may be said that the constraints of marriage have been pushed a little too far in certain directions, and that the worst enemies of the bond are precisely the well-meaning people who are agitating in obvious defiance of Nature s precepts for a further equalisation of the sexes. It is worthy of note that the working classes are the marrying classes of our day. Now, it is precisely amongst those dames that the constraints of marriage are least felt. Working men and women know little of the deadly struggle of keeping up appearances, and, among them, the wife is, in sober truth, the helpmate of her husband which in the upper cis sec-- she so often fails to be. L'ndoubtedly the natural inclination of the sexes is to eome together, and if any considerable number of eligible women remain unpaired the reason must be sought in the artificial conditions of marriage ala mode. I attach little importance to the natural inequality of the numbers of men and women respectively. It is the fact no doubt that the consumption of male fife is greater than that of female, and although the males are in a majority when bom. at fifty years of age they are in a slight minority. About the marrying age. or what ought to be snch, however, the sexes are tolerably equal, and if every Jack paired off with Jill the residue of single women would not oe worth agitating about.

‘ Un the part of men there is probably as little real repugnance to marriage as there is on the part of Churchmen to the burying of Dissenters. It is not the ends but the means that is objected to. I can imagine ayoung man who hears of the hardships of nice young women in failing to find busbands, and in being denied the joys of maternity—l can imagine this young man, I say, repudiating warmly and very sincerely the alleged disinclination of his class to make the pretty dears happy, and exclaiming, “ Not marry them ! Why, I shouldn’t mind marrying a dozen, if they will only say the word.” It is invariably the case that when a law is made too stringent for the ordinary necessities of human nature it defeats its own purposes ; it either falls into abeyance or human nature dammed up in one channel overflows into another. The extremely complicated provisions of the French law of marriage are probably responsible for the excessive number of irregular unions in France, and the indulgence with which they are regarded—a point I commend to the attention of the morality-mongers in our midst. That polygamy is the true remedy for the existing state of things, as some bold spirits have suggested, I doubt; for in the countries where it prevails it is defeated partly by the natural instincts of mankind, and partly by the ’fact that there are not women enough to do much more than go round. Possibly increased facilities for divorce would have the effect of rubbing marriage of some of its terrors. I make this suggestion with diffidence, and only because the case seems almost a desperate one. But, after all, it is a terribly serious business putting your hand into the bag and drawing out a partner with whom you are compelled to pass the remainder of your life whether yon prove to be congenially mated or otherwise. There is a very wise Italian saying to the effect that all the brains are not in one head. It applies to nations no less than to individuals. Now, over a very wide stretch of human history, and even among civilisations that have been little, if at all, inferior to our own, a comparatively slight matrimonial bond has been deemed sufficient to safeguard the interests of the community. The tie of the children might be trusted more than it is to hold couples together. At the same time divorce being rendered possib.e, say, by mutual consent, men would probably hesitate leas than they now do to incur the responsibilities of mar rage. • I fear there is nothing for it bnt to apply to the matrimonial market the same inexorable laws that regulate other markets. The possible purchaser cannot be forced—he must be induced—to buy, and the most obvious means to this end is that women should abate some of those pretensions of theirs which are the bane of middle and upper class life. Their fault, like that of the Dutch in commerce, is giving too little and asking too much.’