WAR AND WEDLOCK.

Taranaki Daily News, 10 April 1918, Page 7

WAR AND WEDLOCK.

WILL POLYGAMY OR FREE LOVli ! '' PREVAIL? THE GREATEST POST-WaH PROBLEM. (By Geoffrey Singleton). In a recent sermon at St. Paul's Cathedral, London, the Bishop of Peterborough said:— "One of the tragedies of the war ia that the wholesale destruction of young manhood will have the effect that many thousands of girls will never know the joys of motherhood." That is a tragedy which no one can estimate now, but it ia becoming more terrible as the war goes on. The first armies in the field were composed largely of married men, husbands, and fathers. The new levies are composed of young men, most of them unmarried. The new casualty lists represent the loss not only of the men of this but of those of the next generation.

Counting all the Belligerents, it is safe to say that up to the end of last year the world has lost between four and five million men who have not known marriage or fatherhood. In those countries where the male always has been numerically the effect will not be felt immediately. In countries like England, where the percentage usually has been 55 women to 45 of men, the effect will be overwhelming.

This is now realised by thinking people and the Bishop of Peterborough only expressed what many feel when he said, in the Bame sermon: "One grave question of the future, perhaps of the near future, is the ideas of marriage which will prevail. It is possible that the holy estate, Will be attacked in a way we never have known; we may be confronted by the efforts of many .people, in view of the present dented situation." What are "the efforts ot many people" to which the Bishop refers? In general, they fall into two divisions, indicated by these two questions:— Will the world go in for polygamy after the war? Or shall we nave a world where there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage 1 From the day Great Britain set half a million women of all degrees working at munitions, prophets have announced that marriage was done for. A little prematurely they deelared that the women of "after the war" would be economically independent and would not need to marry. They said she would choose her husband where she liked and keep him as long as she chose, and no longer. And now comes a German, Major-Gen-eral Andres, attached to the Turkish army, who declares in all sober seriousness that the only hope for his country is in the adoption of polygamy. It is clear that something like polygamy is being considered by the devastated counI tries of Europe.

WHAT IS LIKELY TO HAPTEN. Between, these two extremes some change will probably come over the institution of marriage as we know it today. The war, which has torn up men's lives by the roots, is not likely to be a respector of conventions. What will be the new relationship between men and women after the war? The first thing to be noted is that the prophets of the woman worker have begun to draw in their sails a little. Their chief mistake was in forgetting that neither men nor women live and love by themselves. They said that women were earning their own living, and therefore women were liberated. And they forgot that all the money in the world never liberated a woman from loving a man, nor did it emancipate her from a longing for children.

After hearing a great deal of talk about the free woman I went to a certain munition factory and looked up the matron-in-charge, an old friend of mine. Her experience in establishing social centres at munition plants had taken her all over England since the war began: she, had made friends with thousands of girls and had been their mother-confes-sor; she knew many hundreds of married women who had come into the factories to make Bill and Bert a useful prosent in the shape of a shell. I asked her what effect "munishing" would have on the women of England. "Listen," she said. "You take a year's holiday and wander through the factories —really, do. Then, on the day you find one of my girls crooning a lullaby to it loin shell or putting on her best bib and tucker for a box of cordite, come to me and I will answer your question. I will tell you then that marriage is a 'washout,' as the lads say. But not till then."

Tt is quite likely, though, that the real transforming power of the woman workid will not be in absolute industria* tasks, but in other work Women who could prepare breakfast for their husbands, send the children off to school, and then go to a "movie'" in the afternoon will still exist after the war. But a fair number of them will not sit among the audience—they will be operating the picture machine themselves. And through the length and breadth of Britain women have proved that they can deliver bread and milk in the morning, or call taxis to" the department store entrance, or sell tickets at the box office. CHANCE OF TROUBLE These occupations and thousands of others make an inspiring total of women workers not on war work, and a faff percentage of the women employed in such work will he able to "carry on" after their husbands come home. Trouble may come for a short time when the men sire being demobilised and find women in their jobs. In the end some readjustment will be made. The net result will be that in Britain now women will have to marry in order to keep alive, and mtiny women will keep working after they are married And every married man and woman knows that marriage is a lot different when the distaff side is earning its little bit.

Possibly the prophets who announce the dissolution of all marriage ties will have some reason to claim Ihey wera right. Some countries are less strict than others in regard to marriage; in parts of Southern Europe, for instance, illigitimate children are recognised by the law as having claims on inheritance. If the necessity for rcpopulation becomes very acute it is quite likely that children born out of wedlock will receive fullerrecognition from the law, and possibly from society. The growing independence of women will have its due effect in another way, according to those who have watched the growth of various feminist movements in Europe. Women who are tied to their husbands bv ""-""nric r sons willhavcagTeattßeW'c."* B " They will cither be ah„, husbands really ir.orio";viiJ gf; Haut Uy'eat of going oCand lKiug- on

their own salaries, or, say some theori/;s, they will entirely transform the marriage institution by making matrimony a temporary affair, a contract to be cancelled at will, by mutual consent or at the option of either contracting party. All this is only one side of the question. It draws all its conclusions from the feature of this war which is entirely new—the work of women. It does not take into full account the normal feature of warfare, which has been accentuated bo dreadfully in this war—namely, the destruction of men's lives When Marshall Joffre told the United States that France was "bled white" he meant that the husbands and lovers of Prance were all either at the front or dead on the field of honor. When Germany reports that she has suffered over four million casualties she means, although she does not say, that of the fathers of this and the next generation one out of every four or five is dead, flisabled, wounded, or missing. Can you wonder that Germany is thinking seriously of polygamy ?

HORRORS QF THE FUTURE. It is not a question Cn which anyone would willingly be frivolous, for whether polygamy is authorised by a cynical go. vernment or is practised and winked at by cynical people, a woeful lot of unhappiness is bound to come in the lives o> the two generations which will carry on the reconstruction after the war. Condemn it as an increase of immorality or approve of it as an expression of the growing freedom of men and women in their most precious relationship, you cannot avoid the complications and the unhappiness which such a change must bring. Millions »f men and women who have been brought up to cherish fidelity and candor in their relations with each other may see the whole fabric of their lives rent and despoiled.

What is there On the other side? Take the ease of England, where women always have been in the majority. Consider what will happen after the war when tens of thousands of men will refuse to return to the office and the factory and the dirty smelling streets, preferring to go out with their new-found chums from Australia and New Zealand and Canada. Already many an Anzac invalided out of the army has returned to his sheep run, all the better for " wife from "Home." The percentage of surplus women will be higher than ever. If you prefer to think of this lightly, you may say that there will be some wonderful battles between designing young women and that the men certainly will not lack for choice of their wives. But there is a serious side. After the American Civil War, when those who were spared trekked to-the West and the old homesteads in New ».ugland were left to fall into ruin, an ur.*ippy time came to the East. Spinsterhood, the stale subject of staler jokes, was not so funny there as jt seemed. Girls who faded slowly out of the picture, women who took to mothering other people's children, or, for lack of anything he.tter turned fiercely to each passing fad or momentary hysteria, were the marks of the war.

And that war was trifling in its coSt when compared with the present war. Immigration helped America to make up its defficit. After this war immigration can help one country only by robbing another. The United States probably will remain the happiest country after the war. 'What of Germany and France and England?

Unhappy as the future seems, some consolation can be found m the very perplexity of the prophets. Some of them say one thing, others the exact opposite. So, if you look at the problem not as an economist, with statistics and curves and diagrams, but as a human being with a human heart, you can see that the two theories may cancel each other out. If the world were a problem in algebra, run by professors, they would cancel out exactly. But since it is only a human world, with ordinary people living in, it, the actual process will bo hard.