The Evening Star FRIDAY, JULY 2, 1875.

Evening Star, Issue 3855, 2 July 1875, Page 2

The Evening Star FRIDAY, JULY 2, 1875.

In the Colonies, from time to time, the question is discussed : what shall we do with our boys 1 As for the girls it is supposed that there is no necessity to trouble ourselves. Yet we venture to say that every man in a genteel position, and not overburdened with means, having four or five daughters, is more perplexed how to dispose of them than if they were lads. This difficulty, like the boy problem, has its origin in the false estimates of social duty brought with us from Europe, where a privileged class born “with silver spoons for their mouths,” and destined to live without care or labor, has introduced modes of thought which too readily find acceptance among well-to-do classes in the Colonies. We venture to say that these conventional usages have been productive of more misery to women than any other cause whatever. “ I cannot dig, to beg I am ashamed,” led the steward of old to acts of dishonesty and to corruption of others ; but if inability to earn an honest living has been the means of leading one man, in whom moral principle was weak, into vice, it has been the ruin of hundreds of thousands of women. As a passing observation we may remark that* this unhappy result has been intensified through the tyranny of the working classes over each other, by which the field of labor suitable for women has been narrowed. There are many light employments to which they could readily adapt themselves which men have hitherto monopolised. Not many months since, for instance, in England, a strike took place at a factory because some women were employed on light, elegant manufacturing work, which they could do, perhaps, even better than men. To the credit of some of the workmen, they manfully vindicated the right of women to engage in the employment, and pointed out the cowardice and injustice of the malcontents in seeking to exclude them from any labor to which they were equal; and, though sulkily, through mere shame the opposition was withdrawn. It might have been supposed that in the Colonies, where the disproportion of the sexes is so great—the males in New Zealand numbering 170,981, and females only 128,533 every woman would be eagerly sought in marriage. Yet this is not the case. Men, in many employments, are too roving and unsettled in their habits to think of sitting down to domestic life; and even in towns, the large proportion of young men are struggling with narrow incomes after position, and do not feel themselves justified in seeking to induce the daughters of well-to-do citizens, their equals in education and social habits, to forsake the comfort and independence of their parents’ homes to share with them in the difficulties of the up-hill fight they are engaged in. It is, therefore, the genteel classes girls well educated, but without fortunes to maintain them

should their parents be taken from them • that find the greatest difficulty in obtaining suitable em-» ployment. The only alternative open for them is, if possible, to find engagements as teachers, and in this line the competition is so great that unless highly gifted or very fortunate they earn less than a servant of all work. In the meantime young wives and mothers are subjected to every possible inconvenience because of the difficulty of obtaining help in their homes. If a servant applies for a place and finds a baby in the house or three or four young children, she at once refuses to accept the situation. If she finds that the household is regulated on principles of prudence, care, and economy she possibly takes offence and moves herself off. A correspondent handed us a few days ago a scrap of paper left by one of this class on his kitchen table, she having only been an inmate of the house some five or six days, and taking care on her departure to secure her week’s wages by purloining some knives and forks. The memo, was as follows; —“I cannot stay longer—the idea of living in a place where my sugar is measured out, and then go part of the week without. I never had to do the like before, and I am not going to, now. When that is the way things are to go on, ’tis time for me to bid farewell.” And she went. Our correspondent has been in the habit of keeping his servants two and three years. The social incoveniences of this servant-girl tyranny are such that it has almost become necessary for society to find a remedy. Whether the plan adopted by a family in Victoria—of taking a well-educated friend in reduced circumstances, willing to do the work if treated as a companion, with a seat in the parlor and at meals, and paying her the wages of a good servant—will find acceptance and solve the difficulty we do not know. We are told the family has not hitherto been so well served as how. We think it would answer, if the idea of degradation were removed by a determination on the part of society to recognise and receive employees of that class on previous terms. The difficulty lies there.