Social Moods.

Alexandra Herald and Central Otago Gazette, Issue 429, 11 August 1904, Page 7

Social Moods.

. GJEL WIVES AND BOY HUSBANDS SKS London alone there are some IS 000 «b married persona who are twenty ,SE J«w of age or utdir. They beein early—the girls at thirteen years of age, A recent report showed that in the metropolis there were ten wives aee<* fifteen, 28 wives and widows aged sixteen, 164 wives and widows of seventeen years of age, 971 agsd eighteen, 3718 aged >. nineteen, and 6672 wives and widows at {twenty years. The husbands were ; naturally fewer. Yet there were 787 bus--1 bands from sixteen to nineteen years old and 2022 just twenty years of age. Boy and girl marriages are more numerous among the unskilled labor class than among the skilled workers. They abound most in the poverty areas of London. In the face of these figures it is not snrprising that, among a large percentage of the people they include, marriage Bhould indeed be a failure. The majority of such marriages are contracted in absolute poverty. Not a sovereign—no, nor half a sovereign—has baen saved. The few •sticks'—and sticks, indeed, they areare obtained on the hire system-one shilling down. The girl-wife can neither cock nor sew j to sweep and scrub she is averse as well as unaccustomed. Beared in some squalid, two-roomed home, she has passed in the streets the time she could steal from tcaool. So, too, with the boy-husband The overcrowded home, with its want of welcome, throws bim on the street. His life, reacting en an una wakened mind, makes his days deadly dull. He craves

for excitement—society— change. Ab lie grows from boyhood to adolescence, he needs a companion And so, partly from natural sexual selection and partly, as his age and wages inciease, because he associates more with men, he seeks a wife. For his .new estate he wants a cook and a washerwoman, and he marries to find he has got neither the one nor the other. It is a curious faet that in London, on the night of the census, of the s 3 wives whoae husbands were not living with them, 742 were under twenty years of age, and of these, again, 40 were fifteen, sixteen and seventeen years old. Of the two boy-husbands of sixteen, one was in hospital and the other in gaol! Altogether there were about 2000 husbands under age who were not living with their wives. Now take the country at large. In one year thero were in all 56 898 married persons under age to be found in England and Wales. But of every 1000 husbands, 50 were minors, and out of every 1000 wives, 165 were under age,

BYGONE COURTESIES.

In the old days, when people need the word «genteel' inutead of ' well bred,' and it was considered elegant to quirk the little finger when one lifted a cup of tea, there were certain marks of reßpeot to age which seem to have vanished among other obsolete forms of courtesy, says the * Altfcsburg Gazette.' For instance, when an elderly lady entered the room, it was customary for those mure youthful to rise and remain standing until the elderly lady had seated herself or passed through, Also in those long, past days, a gentleman removed hie hat and kept it in his hand while he conversed with an elderly lady, unless she gave him permission to replace it. and these laws were like unto the laws of the Medea and Persians, and those who respected them not boob found themselves relegated to the outer darkness of social oblivion.

To-day these courtesies are well nigh unheard of. It is not a mark of the degeneracy of the age, for the age is not degenerate, all pessimists and carping criticß to the oontrary notwithstanding. < Lst us, then, premise that it is but a Bigu of the eternal youth which seems to belong to the woman of to-day. She is no longer relegated to the chimney oorner and the knitting needles when the grey hairs show. She is very often just at the age to enioy herself most fully. The elderly woman of to-day fiads that advancing age does not rob her of her mental vigor. She simply hands her housihold duties over to her daughters and proceeds to take the leisure she has earned in tbe way she likes best, if she ever desired to study Hebrew now is her chasoe. Sbe joins clubs and goes into club work with an energy and vim which are astounding. She is as young as the youngest, in feeling, but with a broad experience and a maturity of judgment which are enviable, to say the least, and give her a wonderful prestige. Then, if the elderly woman has vanished, so is it but natural that the rights which wer.j hers sdould also vanish. And though we mourn the seeming loss of pretty formalities, we have gained much more.