Traveller.

Alexandra Herald and Central Otago Gazette, Issue 409, 10 March 1904, Page 7

Traveller.

THE AGE OF MARRIAGE. SEN Denmark a girl of twelve and a boy alp of fourteen can marry. In most 2k places the limit of age is eighteen for men and sixteen for women. In Germany a man can only contract marriage before nis 21st year when he is specially declared of age, and this can only be done when he has completed hie eighteenth year. The law of France is specially notable for stipulating about the legal rights of eaoh party, and the relations of each to the earnings of the other. It is literally true that the man who marries a French woman becomes by French law liable to be called on for the support of his wife's near relatives if they are in need. The relations created by a betrothal in Hungary are expressly declared to give no right to demand the conclusion of a marriage. UTOPIA UNATTAINED. The little settlement of Harmony, situated amongst abundant leafage and and fat pasture lands on an elbow of the Wabash River, has been the' theatre of two of the most singular social experir meats in the world's history. To this remote corner of Indiana in 1815 George Rapp, a German farmer and religions fanatic, brought his 1000 followers, and named their new home Harmoaie. The first Harmonists were sober-minded, thrifty German peasants; they neither married nor were given in marriage; they had all .things in common; they lived frugally and.worked without stint. Their creed and their circumstances alike forbade idleness or even innocent relaxation. Little wonder that their efforts, guided by their chief, who waß at once task-master and prophet, built up in a few years a thriving community, rich in flocks, vineyards, and corulands, with grist mill, dyeing factory, church, fortified granary and streets of substantial dwelling houses. In 1825 Robert Owen, seeking for a standpoint from which to move the world, purchased the settlement as it stood, and issued an invitation to all comers to enter and take possession. Born in the early years of the great" industrial revolution* Robert Owen, who had earned his own living since the age of ten, found himself at twenty manager of a cotton mill and 500 operatives. Nine pr ten years later, at the opening of the last century, he came as managing partner to assume absolute control over a cotton factory at New Lanark, near Glasgow, employing over 2900 perhaps, and earning for its owners a net profit varying from J610,000 to .£30,000 a year. For most men at that time, even more than now, such a position was just an opportunity for heaping up riches for their sons, and daughters to squander. But, step' by step, Owen /abolished crime, abolished drunkenness, almost abolished dirt. He rebuilt the. cottages, shortened the hours of labour, humanised the life of his wage earners, The schools of New Lanark became the wonder of Europe, and Owea's factory, a Mecca to which statesmen, philanthropists, ''social reformers, and .even.the heir-apparent of the Czar, made pilgrimage from all the world. Thus in less than twenty-years Robert Owen had reformed his little kingdom, and there came to him the thought that by such means and on sueh lines might the world itself be remade, poverty, crime and wretchedness abolished, and the millenium ushered in. Bat the indiscriminate mob who- accepted Owen's invitation to New Harmony were of different stuff -from Ripp's German peasants, or even the New Lanark factory hands. The habit of hard work and the handofjfche benevolent despot were wanting, the would-be communists danced and debated and drew up' paper constitutions, and quarrelled and divided again and again into ever smaller communities, and finally gravitated barf, from communism to competition, K