POLYGAMY.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXVII, Issue 1443, 7 September 1915, Page 2

POLYGAMY.

A uuri.in report of an irritating brevity refers to the proposals that have been “ broached in some quarters” for the legal establishment of polygamy as an aid to a population so tragically reduced by war. Not for the first time, we are informed, has polygamy been ordained and instituted for such a purpose. In 1650 it was enacted by a local Diet that it should be illegal to take into cloisters any man under the age of sixty, also that certain classes of priests should be allowed to marry, and furthermore that every male person should be permitted to marry ten women. “There is,” remarks the Vanity Fair writer of the Argonaut, “ no record of the response to this gracious permission, but we may assume that it lacked enthusiasm. Fancy wanting to marry ten women! “Of course there is much to be said for plurality of wives. If one were allowed to have half a dozen or so the quality would not be so important. What one wife lacked another could supply. The bigoted monogamist overlooks the fact that a particular wife may be eminently suited to one occasion and yet be quite out of place upon another, just as evening clothes are well adapted to the dinner table but would be merely absurd at breakfast, in

just the same way a wife may have all the qualifications for breakfast time—although few have —such as a habit of silence and the ability to refrain from a lightsome demeanour, and yet be quite unsuited for dinner, when the chief requisite is a capacity to put adroit questions calculated to elicit some aspects of one’s omniscience on the affairs of the world. “ The average man needs at breakfast an inaudible sympathy and at dinner an audible hut well-regu-lated deference There are very few women who can supply both, or indeed either of them, in the right place. Kither she will be offensively blithesome at breakfast, or taciturn and reproachful at dinner. Now under what may be called the platoon system you select your wile for each occasion with due attention to her natural idiosyncrasies. But of course we shall not gel to this point yet awhile, and perhaps it is just as well.”