LEAP YEAR.
THE LADIES’ PRIVILEGE,
TAX ON BACHELORS,
With the arrival of 1928 comes another leap year, the one year in every four when the right of “popping the question” is given to ladies. It is the year when bachelors who desire to escape the blissful state of matrimony have to be alert, although in modern times, the dangers attached to leap-year from their point of view, have largely disappeared. Old customs are tumbling in scores nowadays. 'The bishops propose to remove St. Valentine from the Anglican calendar as a merely mythical person. iSome are unkind enough to say the modern miss has no need of the leap-year privilege—that she makes every year a leap-year. Certain commentators on twentieth century society will have it that woman never needs to go to the length of “popping the question herself.” Mr. Arnold Bennett warns the young man of today to beware, lest, when he thinks he is choosing he is, in fact, being chosen.
Mr. H. L. Mencken, who is regarded as the leading American cynic, sums up the situation thus: “The average man does not marry because some marble fair one challenges his enterprise. He marries because chance throws into his way a fair one who repels him less actively than most, and because his delight in what he thus calls charm is reinforced by a growing ’suspicion that she has fallen in love with him. In brief, it is chivalry that undoes him. The girl who infallibly gets a husband —in fact any husband that she wants —is the one ydio tracks him down boldly, fastens him with sad eyes, and then, when his conscience has begun to torture him, throws her arm around his neck, bursts into maidenly tears on his shoulder, and tells him that she fears her forwardness will destroy his respect for her. It is only a colossus that can resist such strategy.” Perhaps it would be otherwise if the gentler sex could reply upon statutory support such as was given in Scotland in 1288, under the titular queen, Margaret, “the Maid of Norway.” It was then enacted that “it is statut and ordaint that during the rein of his maist billit Megeste, for ilk yeare fcnowe as lepe years, ilg mayden ladye of bothe highe and lowe estait shall hae liberate to bespeke ye man she likes, albeit he refuses to tailk hir to be his lawful wyfe he shall be mulcted in ye sum ane pundis or less, as his estait may be; except and awis gif he can make it appeare that he is betrothit an iteher woman than she shall be free.”
Margaret can scarcely be put forward as the feminist author of the law enacted in her name, for she did not cross the North Sea until 1290, and died in Orkney the same year, aged 17. The custom is believed) to have had an earlier origin, although history is silent on the subject. It was perpetuated in France and Northern Italy in the Aliddle Ages, but afterwards ceased to have legal sanction.
The Scottish law was in effect a tax on bachelors, although whether the fine went to the rebuffed lady or into the State coffers is not clear. It must have been a good deal more severe than a straightout tax in some eases —that of the good-looking and generally eligible bachelor, for example. Its results do not seem to have been put on record, nor yet the reasons for enacting it. Perhaps the Church desired on general principles that the people should be fruitfull and multiply, and the State taxes bachelors, to revive the old Scottish and Italian law in these times?
Will it be left to Mussolini, who now wanted fighting men to defend its borders.
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Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 3748, 31 January 1928, Page 4
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629LEAP YEAR. Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 3748, 31 January 1928, Page 4
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