MATRIMONY AND TRADE DEPRESSION.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XVI, Issue 213, 7 September 1881, Page 4

MATRIMONY AND TRADE DEPRESSION.

The annual report of the BegistrarGeneral for England and Wales is not usually looked upon aa an entertaining document. Nevertheless, to anyone who will transmute the figures into facts, the tabular statements of Sir Brydges Henniker are singularly rich in materials from which to deduce safe conclusions regarding cur moral and material prosperity. To look no further afield than the marriage returns for the year 1879, we find in the report just issued some interesting particulars, that are worth bringing t) light. A high marriage rate is— with, perhaps, the exception of Ireland — rightly considered a proof of the prosperity of the m.tion. Individuals may be thougbtles?, but the community, sh a whole, iB provident, and doea not rashly accept ; the responsibility of providing for many ; when there are but Blender prospects of supporting more than one in com- • forr. According to this test, the year s 1879 muet have been one of extraordi- . nary depression ; forlthe marriage rate

of that year wag the lowest on record since civil registration began. In the "flush" year of 1873, 17.6 per thousand of the people entered into wedlock; from that ctate the rate declined uninterrupte Uy unfci 1 , n 1879, it stood no higher than 14.5 per thousand. In other words. 233,544 people found it necessary to remain single, who, had the rate remained during these six years at the same level as 1873, would have married. This decrease was not confined to any one district, or class of districts, butiprevailed in almost every part of the kiogdom, and may be said to have applied equally to nearly every country on the Continent in which trade waa dull. In England and Waleß the mining districts St-em to have most felt the necessity of checking their natural propensity to wedlock, while the agricultural and metropolitan pacts of the kingdom felt it the least of all.