INEQUALITY OF THE SEXES IN AMERICA.

Grey River Argus, Volume IV, Issue 257, 5 September 1867, Page 3

INEQUALITY OF THE SEXES IN AMERICA.

■ Compared against the society of Paris and of London, that of America seems to be all awry. Go into the Medeleine — it is full of ladies ; go into St. James' Palace — it is full of ladies. Every house in England has excess of daughters, about whom mothers have their little dreams, not always unmixed with a little fear. When Blanche is thirty, aud still unsettled, her very father must begin to doubt of her ever going out into life. An old adage says that a girl at twenty says to herself, Who will suit me ? at thirty, Whom shj^y^suit 1 ? Here in America it is not^tW^woinan, but the man, who is a drug in the matrimonial market. No Yankee gill is bound, like a Scottish lassie, like an Irish keni, to serve. in another woman's house for bread. Her face is her fortune, and her lips a prize ; her love more precious than her labor ; her two bright orbs of more value than even her nimble hands. War may have thinned to her disadvantage %he rank and file of lovers ; but the losses of male life by shot and shell, by fever and ague, by waste and privation, have been more than replaced to her from Europe ; and the disproportions of sex and sex, noted before the war broke out, are said to be greater since its close. The lists are crowded with bacheiors wanting wives ; the price of young men is ruling down ; and only the handsome, well doing young fellows have a chance of going off. This sketch is no effort of a fancy, looking for extremes aud loviug the grotesque. When the census was complied (in 1860), the white males were found to be in excess of the white females by seven hundred and thirty thousand sc^'s. Such a fact has no fellow in Europe, except in the Papal States, where society is made by exceptional forces, governed by exceptional rules. In every other Christian country — in France, England, Germany, Spain — the females are in large excess of the males. .. In France there are two hundred thousand women more than men ; in England three hundred and sixty-five thousand. The unusual rule here noticed in America is not confined to any district, any sea-board, any zone. Out of fifty-two organised states and territories, only eight exhibit the ordinary rule of European countries. Eight old settlements are supplied with women.; that is to say, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Columbia ; while the other fifty-four settlements, purchases, and conquests, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the Pacific Ocean, lack this element of a stable, orderly, and virtuous state — a wife for every young man of a proper age to .marry. In some of the western regions, the disparity is such as strikes the moralist with awe. In California there are three men to every woman; in Washington, four men to every woman ; in Nevada, eight men to every woman ; in Colorado, twenty men to eveiy woman. This disparity between sex and sex is not wholly caused, as will be thought, by the large immigration of single men. It is so in degree, no doubt, since far more males arrive by ship at Boston and New York than females ; but if all the new comers were sent back, if no . fresh male were allowed to land in New York unless he brought with him a female companion, a sister, a wife, still a large per centage of the people would have to go down into their graves unmarried. More males are born than females. Casting off the German and Irish quota, there will still be four men in the hundred in this great Republic for w,hom natiu;e has sent no female mates, ilmmigration

only comes to the help of nature ; Europe sending in hosts of bachelors to fight for the few women, who would otherwise be insufficient for the- native men. In the whole mass of whites the disproportion if five in the hundred ; so that one man in every twenty males born in the United States can never expect to have a wife of his own. What is hardly less strange than this large displacement of this sexes among the white population, is the fact that it is not explained and corrected by any excess in the inferior types. . There are more yellow men than yellow women, more red braves than red squaws. Only the negroes are of nearly equal number; a slight excess being counted on the female fsiile. Very few Tartars and Chinese have bro ugh t. their wives and daughters with them into this, country. On their first coining over they expected to get rich in a year, and return to sip tea and grow oranges -in their native land. Many of those who are now settled in« California and Montana, are sending for their mates, who may come or may not, having' mestly; perhaps, been married again in. th,e absence of their lords. The preseiaiyfetfe is 18 yellow men to one yelloAv w.omau. As yet the red-skins have been counted in groujjs and patches only, in the more settled districts of Michigan, Minnesota, California, and New Mexico ; but in all districts, though the influences are here unusually favorable to female life, males are found in excess of females, in the proportion of five to four. Think what this large excess of men over women entails in the way of trial on American society; think what a state that country must be in which counts up in its fields, in its cities, seven hundred arid thirty thousand unmarried men ! Bear in mind that these crowds of prosperous fellows are not bachelors by choice, selfish dogs, women haters, men .useless to themselves aud to the world in which they live. There are average young men, busy and pushing ; fellow's who "would rather fall into love than into sin ; who would be fond of the r wives and proud of 'their children if society would only provide them with lawful mates. Whac are they now? An army of monks without the defence of a religious vow. These seven hundred and thirty thousand bachelors have never promised to be chaste ; many of cheni, it may be feared, regard the tenth commandment a little more than a paper law. You say to them in eilect, "You arc not to pluck these flowers, not to trample on these borders, if you please." Suppose that they will not please? How is the un wedded youth to be hindered from covetin^ his neighbor's' wife? You know what Naples is, what Munich is. You have .seen the condition of Liverpool, Cadiz, Antwep, Livorno; of every city, of every port, in which there is a floating population of single<men ; but in which of these cities do you find any approach to New York, in the show of open and triumphant vice 1 Men who know New York' far worse than myself assure me that in depth and darkness of iniquity, neither Paris in its private haunts, nnr London in its open streets, can hold a candle to it. Paris may be subtler, London may be grosser, in its vices ; but for largeness of depravity, for domineering insolence of sin, for rowdy callousness to censure, they tell me that the Atlantic city finds no rival on the earth. Do all these evils come with the anchoring ship, and stream from the quays into the city ? No one will say so. The quays of New York are like the quays of any other port. They, are the haunts of drabs and thieves; they are covered with grog-shops and stews ; but the men who land on these quays are not' viler in taste than those who land in Southampton, in Hamburg, iv Genoa. What, then, makes the Empire City a cesspool by the side of which European- ports seem almost pure? My answer is, mainly the disparity of sex and sex. New York is a great capital; rich and pleasant, gay and luxurious ; a city of freedom, a city of pleasure, to which men come from every part of the Union ; this man for trade, that for counsel, a third for relaxation, a fourth for adventure. It is a place for the idle man, as well as for the busy man. Crowds flocks to its hotels, to its theatres, to its gaminghouses ; and we need no angel from heaven to tell us what kind of company Avill amuse an unmarried man having dollars in his purse. On the other side, this demand for mates who can never be supplied, not in one place only, .but in every place alike, affects the female mind with a variety of plagues; driving your sister into a thousand restless agitations about her rights aud powers ; into debating woman's era in history, woman's place iv creation, woman's mission in the family; into public hysteria, into table-rapping, into anti-wedlock societies, into theories about free, love, natural marriage, and' artistic maternity ;. into anti-offspring resolutions, into sectarian pologamy, into free trade of the affections, into community of wives. Some part of this wild disturbance of the female mind, it may be urged, is- due to the freedom and prosperity which women find in America as compared against what they enjoy iv Europe ; but this freedom, this prosperity, are in some degree, at least, the consequences of that disparity in numbers which makes a hand of every young girl in the United States a positive prize.