BANKERS' CLERKS AND MARRIAGE.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume VI, Issue 82, 8 April 1871, Page 3

BANKERS' CLERKS AND MARRIAGE.

( From the Saturday Revieio. ) The Directors of one of the London Banks, having recently forbidden their clerks to marry unless they are receiving salaries of £150 a-year or upwards, the Saturday Review thus comments on the/ prohibition : — / We will begin, by stating in the plainest language that to our minds the action of. the Directors is immoral, tyrannical, and foolish. It is immoral, because the natural consequence of ordering a poor young man in London to abstain from marriage is to encourage him to take up with some temporary substitute for marriage. It is tyrannical, because it is an attempt to interfere in matters with which the bank Directors have no particular concern. Of course the Directors might reply that they have a good right, if tbey please, to employ only bachelors, as they have a ri«ht, if they please, to employ only red-haired men, or only men whose Christian name is John. Nobody calls a private person tyrannical for preferring an unmarried, cook or a butler " without incumbrances," and the bank Directors, if they please, may take the same course. If a bachelor suits their purpose better than a married man, why should they not take ,liirn : by preference ? The answer, which to us seems) to be a satisfactory one, is that the

married man is, on tho whole, likely to be a better clerk than the bachelor. He is likely to bo more industrious, and has stronger motives for being honest. And therefore a restriction of the kind in question is probably dictated, not by a legitimate desire for the welfare of the business, but by a desire to interfere in matters which are better left to their own course. In other words, it is tyrannical because it is foolish. "Tfc is an attempt at regulation pushed beyond what the interests of the business demand, and' rather prejudicial to them than useful. This point is, however, of comparatively little interest. If we disapproved, in fact, of any one marrying who had not £150 ayear, the Directors might naturally think themselves our converts in prohibiting marriage "beneath that limit. The inference would' be grossly illogical, for there are many things in which we disapprove which we do not desire to see discouraged by any but moral means. For example, we disapprove strongly of ingratitude ; we disapprove of people writing hysterical nonsense in newspapers ; we disapprove of gentlemen drinking too much port ; but we don't want to see any of these things forbidden by law, nor always by social regulations ; and what, if any, means of discouragement should be applied to them is a difficult and delicate problem. Still, if we had been writing strongly against any -^jee or weakness, people who proposed to put it clown by unjustifiable means might be pardoned for quoting our authority. Gentlemen who murder kings generally quote iv their own defence the authority of all writers against tyranny y and the writers Lave sometimes a difficulty in repudiating the inference. ' Do we, then, object to any man marrying who has not £150 a-year ? Iv answering such an imputation, we feel something like the Bishop of London in tho old but excellent story. After the right reverend prelate had preached a sermon on the existence of the Deity, one of his hearers, / on being asked for his opinion of its merits^ apologized for differing from its conclusion. "You see, my lord," was his modest explanation, " / think there be a God." We always fancied ourselves to have maintained that matrimony was, on the whole, a conv^ meudable institution. Indeed, we have generally found fault with the fiery advocates of women's rights because we found that they showed a tendency towards the disparagement of marriage. We also held that their views on that important question were the weakest point in their case ; and we have been sternly rebuked for our oldfashioned prejudices, and our willingness to sacrifice even such important objects as the right of voting, in our nervous anxiety for the sanctity of the marriage vows. Yet it now appears that we object to persons marrying without a pecuniary qualification which would render marriage impracticable amongst the lower orders. We should ardently desire to see every Englishman in the possession of £150 a-year ; but till that Utopian wish is realized we hold that most people ought to marry, though they have no prospect of becoming liable to the Income-tax. For remainder of news see fourth page.

What, then, was the real bearing of the advice so strangely misinterpreted? For we by no means deny that we have given some advice which seems to be very unpalatable, that we intend to give it in future, and that our only reason for writing this article is a desire to take a favorable^ opportunity of giving it with all due emphasis at the present moment. It is in truth so simple and so obvious that the only wonder is that it should be regarded as paradoxical. To illustrate its meaning let us suppose that one of the clerks at the Union Bank asked the advice of any sensible friend upon the propriety of his marriage, aud that the sensible friend thought fit for once to give a candid opinion. We imagine that he would probably speak to the following effect :— You are anxious to incur a very heavy responsibility ; you are undertaking to support the woman with whom you are in love, and the children she may bear you. As you are a young man in receipt of a small income, it is highly probable that you may have a large family and great difficulty in maintaining them. Your wife may be forced to be become a mere domestic drudge; your children may have to sink to a social position beneath your own, and to receive an inferior education; life may become one long struggle against difficulties, in which all refinement, comfort, and independence may depart from your home. If you have the courage to face such dangers, well and good; but do not leave them out of account in a moment of passion. To do so is to be grossly unjust to your future wife and to deserve very ill of your friends and your country. Marriage, in short, is no exception to the ordinary principle which governs human affairs, that a man ought carefully to count the cost before he pledges himself to undertake very grave duties; and pecuniary evils, though we may affect to despise them, are really those which most frequently crush a man's whole strength and energy, and defeat his highest aspirations. But what, it may be said, is the good of insisting upon this ? Who denies or doubts it ? Would anybody say that marriage should be undertaken without regard to such considerations, unless he were writing a novel for schoolgirls, or proposing that we should return to savage life and listen to nothing but our animal instincts ? The answer is, that though nobody may avow such principles explicitly, for people who obey them are not apt to be very clear-headed as to the meaning of their own advice, yet there is a very large aud flourishing sect which supports them in a slightly disguised form, and which acts upon them with the utmost confidence and the worst possible consequences. Who does not know the typical curate, obliged to live like a gentleman on less than £150 a year, and to bring up a family of a dozen children ? We are constantly receiviug pathetic appeals in such cases, which throw a curious light upon the opinions prevalent amongst a large class of society. A poor man always thinks himself justified in begging when his pig dies, and a poor curate when his twelve children are born. The theory appears to . be that the death of the pig or the birth of the twelve children is a special providential interference, which it was totally impossible for human intelligence to foresee. Pigs might, it would seem, be fairly expected to be immortal, and the marriages of poor curates to lead to none of those natural results which marriage is, we are told by the Church of England, intended to produce. Public opinion sees no absurdity in this sentiment. We are told that we are brutal, cynical, and profane if we ask why the man married before he saw his way to bringing up a family. The command " increase and multiply " is interpreted to mean that civilised beings are bound by a divine law to bring as many children into the world as they can, regardless of consequences. And all this time we are constantly listening to denunciations of. the utter recklessness of our pauper population, and to proofs, only toowunanswerable, that the poverty, and rnwery, and degradation which surround uw are owing to the lower class putting in practice precisely the same lessons which their monitors are illustrating in a high sphere. could probably name amongst his acquaintances some startling illustrations of the tendency of such teaching. He could point to men of education, breaking down under the strain of continuous labour, and unable by their utmost efforts to do more than live from hand to mouth ; to their wives, losing all traces of refinement, and. losing health and happiness under the wear and tear of the servitude imposed upon them ; and then too often there comes a crash ; the father perhaps dies, and a dozen orphans are "turned loose upon the world, to be squeezed into asylums by a system of begging-letters, or gradually to sink out of sight amongst the masses of thriftless j do-nothings, and good-for-nothings by whom we are siiirourided. The story of the Vicar of Wakefield 1 is : repeated with a

difference ; the vicar is a stupid, shiftless person, who- loses all sense|of self-respect and all spirit, of independence ; no fortune drops in from the clouds at the last pages of the novel of real life, and Miss Olivia and Master Moses and their brothers and sistens are sent abroad to take their chance in a '- wprld for which nobody has endeavoured to give them a Uolerable training. If by good, luck they kept their heads above water, they ( will consider it a solemn duty to multiply, |heir kind as fast as possible, and all the warm-hearted, sympathetic persons wl^o hate a cynic will rejoice at their courag4 and declare in various forms that noble axiom, that when Providence brings mouths into tho world it provides the meaus of filling them. The true statement would be, that when men brings mouths into the world, Providence disposes of them somehow, but whether by filling them or not is a question which depends materially on the foresight of the parents. When we venture to call attention to these obvious facts, and to tho senseless rerusal to admit them which English society has managed to erect into a principle, we are told that we consider marriage as a luxury. In certain . respects it is a luxury. It is a very pleasant thing under favorable circumi stances; aud nobody ought to indulge in it who has not a fair prospect of being able to pay for it and its consequences. But we do not hold it to be a luxury in i theNeense of being useless or demoralising. On tfete contrary, there is much to be said for it, idiich/on due occcasion we may endeavor te* put forward. At present, I however, the British public seem to take | precisely the opposite view. They appear to be so far from thinking marriage to be a luxury, that they hold it to be a necessary; i every young man or woman of marriageable age is bound to marry as soon as he or she has money enough to pay for a licence ; and the popular teacheis of the time are naver tired of denouncing poor old Malthus, and calling any appeal to prudential motives by every hard nanie in their gushing vocabulary. We venture to say, before you marry have a reasonable prospect that you can maintain your wife and children in your own position in life ; if people systematically neglect that precaution, it is as evident as anything can be, short of a mathematical theorem, that the degree of comfort and refinement attained . by the nation, will have a tendency to decline ; and for the simple reason, that i civilized human beings think it right to act as if they were savages. We shall venture, as occasion serves, to point out the flimsiness of the various pretty pretences under which the true nature of the popular advice is disguised, and recommendation to act without the slightest reference to the future comfort of yourself, your wife, and your children, is made to wear the aspect of a lofty moral teaching ; and we have no doubt we shall be regarded as brutal cynics for our pains. We can bear it.