Getting Married in 2012.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLVIII, Issue 17, 23 October 1912, Page 61

Getting Married in 2012.

BEING A PEEP INTO THE FUTURE WHEN THE EUGENISTS HAVE THEIR WAY. A moonlit sea. A seat on the promenade. Two dark figures side by side. “Angela, will you be mine ?’’ “Edwin, I will.” “ Darling I” “ Darling I” The sentimental reader may imagine that this row of asterisks stands for kisses, that it represents one of those delicious pauses which the writers of penny novelettes assure us lovers know so well how to fill up. As a matter of fact, the sentimental reader is quite wrong. In 2012 lovers do not indulge in osculatory embraces owing to the danger of transmitting disease germs. The row of stars is merely intended to mark the lapse of time between the proposal and the “happy day,” or rather tho “ happy days,” for getting married in 2012 is a lengthy and complicated process. The ceremony had been provisionally fixed for the first of April, but a clear month before that date Edwin and Angela presented themselves at the offices of the Board of Public Health, Matrimonial Department, to apply for the license that would allow them to 'be made man and wife.

Unfortunately, they had selected a busy day for their visit, and found themselves obliged to make a lengthy stay in the waiting-room. This was a large apartment with a tiled floor, plain whitewashed walls, and furniture covered with American leather. It Was tastefully decorated with charts showing how hereditary insanity may reappear in a family after several generations, and how a marriage between a man with criminal tendencies, represented by a red spot, and a woman addicted to drink, represented by a green spot, would result in a truly awful offspring, represented 'by a black spot. On the table were exhaustive works on such subjects as consumption and some back numbers of the “Lancet,” to help the waiting couples to wile away the weary hours. At length the turn of Edwin and Angela came, and they were conducted to the room of the Chief Commissioner, who took down in writing their respective ages, the various illnesses they had suffered, their favourite articles of diet, and many other similar details.

Then they were handed over to the tender mercies of the medical profession. The afternoon they spent with the heart specialist. The next morning their teeth were examined by the Board’s own dentist. Another day was spent with the optician and the lung specialist. They pu_t out their tongues, they coughed and said “Ah!” They were pummelled externally with stethoscopes, and examined internally with X-rays, until by the end of the week they were both in a state of nervous prostration.

Still, so far all had gone well. In each case the physician concerned had expressed himself perfectly satisfied with their physical condition, and already they were beginning to have visions of a comfortable little home and matrimonial bliss. All that now remained to be done was to hunt up the history of their respective families and ascertain the records of their ancestors ; then, if all went well, the much-coveted licence of the Board of Health would 'be theirs.

Angela was at Edwin’s house the day the Commissioner’s letter arrived. With nervous haste the young man tore open the official envelope, while the maiden sat upon the sofa, her hands clasped, gazing at him with anxious eyes, for what jov or what sorrow those few neat, typewritten lines would bring to their fond hearts.

The letter was polite, but to the point. The Chief Commissioner regretted to have to inform them that he was unable to issue the license applied for. It hod transpired that an ancestor of the ma’e applicant on the maternal side had in 1612 been hung for piraev on the high seas, and that a forbear of the female applicant. a 'bishop in tho davs of Queen Anne, had enjoyed the doubtful reputation of being a “ four-bottle man.” There was therefore a criminal tendency on the one side and an inclination towards drink on the other. A union between two such persons would imperil the physical fitness of tho nation, under which circumstances the Board had been reluctantly compelled to refuse their sanction.

It may interest the reader to know that Angela soon afterwards became a militant suffragette, while Edwin enlisted, and was kiled during a German Invasion.