HOME MARRIAGE MARKET.

Taranaki Daily News, 25 October 1919, Page 9

HOME MARRIAGE MARKET.

(By Harold Spender.) Happy stories end with, wedding Bells; and it would seem right that the chimes tliitt ring for Peace this summer should ring for many happy unions. For it is the happiest thing about Peace, since the beginning of time, that the warrior yoes back to his womcnkind, and that the old harmony of the sexes, so roughly and brutally disturbed by war, should : be restored.

But there are many things that forbid the banns. First there is the fact that a million men are dead. People talk as if the whole burden of this war had fallen on the manhood of this country. It, is true that, except in Russia at a certain phase of the war, women have not fallen in battle. How much better for many if they had! "It is sweet and fitting to die for your country." Yes; but it is much more difficult to go on living for her when your best-beloved lies in a grave across the sea. The men who fell were the pick of the country. They were worthy of the love of woman. Most have left some woman who mourns—a wife or a sweetheart. Amid the rejoicing over Peace, our thoughts should surely go out to these women who have sacrificed so much—to the widowed wife who has to bring up little children without a father's help, and to the faithful sweetheart who cannot so soon forget her hero.

But some women can rejoice whole, heartedly on these days, for their mankind have returned unscathed and with laurels on their brows. Happy is the woman in such a case! Prices may range high, work may be Bcarce, but life is life, and it is pleasant to live and love—if only in a cflttage. But there is just the rub. For the difficulty of the moment is to find the cottage. It is just in cottages that the house famine prevails. ?alaces are cheap to-day; but palaces have to be furnished and tended. The only house possible for the working man is scarce and difficult to find. There are thousands of war-married couples who can find no homes; and it is no true married life that is without a home. There are hduse queues in London to-day. A Fulham landlord tells me that when one of his houses goes vacant there is a stampede to take possession—and, once in, no family can be turned out. There are streets in working class London to-day where artisan families are crowded three or four to a house, and the bitter paradox is that those arc families that could pay for good houses But they seek in vain where to lay th;ir heads. A vicar in Battersea tells me that his district is steadily sinking under the strain, and that clean and respectable families are becoming dirty and unkempt. For such a state of things makes marriage a mockery and slowly kills the family. Unhappy is the nation whose children become a curse instead of a blessing. Let us hope that the new housing measure will go far to cure these evil? and make this country once more a land of happy homes. For the iState hai now become the one master builder; and it must fulfil its new function, or perish.

But even so, even when wo have tli« houses ready for the couples, there is, in this matter of marriage, going to be a new social crisis which must be boldly faced. It 'k that in this country women are now immensely more t numerous than men. The case was already bad enough before the war. There were even then in this country over a million more women than men. There are now quite two millions more women than men. Before the war there were over a million widows in this country; there are now probably a million and a half. Besides this, the effect of higher prices ia to make men marry later. The nett effect of all these rases is that there are probably some three or four million women of marriageable age now unmarried in this country. I need not dwell on all the glaring results of these new discrepancies between the sexes. They are visible in every street. It is almost as had as the condition foretold by the prophet:—"And in that day seven women shall take hold of one man, saying 'We will eat our own bread and wear our own apparel; only let us be called by thy name, to take away our reproach.'" Of course there is a dead set against the bachelors. How would it be otherwise? In one of the South American Tnter-State wars, Paraguay was so desolated of men that it was very difficult for any woman to obtain a husband. One day a tramp asked for food from a lonely widow who had lost her husband in the war. The tramp was a happy bachelor, enjoying the freedom of single wandering. The widow gave him food, but locked him up in an outhouse for the night. In the morning he asked to' come out. "No, yon stay there today!" she said firmly, and kept him locked in. She fed liim; but she was resolute. . Every morning he. asked the same question; and at list one morning she replied, "Only if you promise to marry me." That was the price of his freedom; and he had to pay it. Let all bachelors take note, and beware—"l am half-sick of shadows," said the Lady of Shalott.

In Paraguay the sexes were equalised by migration. A new supply- of men ivas brought in from other South American States. ißut I gather from the latest "Order-in-Council" that we are to have none of that nonsense here. We have decreed that our women shall not marry aliens, not even, if they are French or Americans. If we cannot marry our own women—owing to our scarcity—they must go unmarired. Rather than that the other dog should come in, the manger is to go empty. But, at any rate, we cannot stop our women from going out. There are still parts of the world where males are in a majority—even in parts of the British Empire. We must sing tearfully to our English sisters, as they sang to us during the war:— "We don't want to lose you, But we think you ought to go,"

The returning Canadian and Australian troops a_re taking some British wives with them" to their own homes. May good luck go witii tliem! After all, they are still witlxin a great family; they are not leaving the old ArmBut some British women still wish to stay here, in the old island, and marry British husbands. They are pleased to say that they like us. To them, therefore, I would respectfully make one or two suggestions. I would advocate the girls of to-day not to fly too high. The marriage market is against them. That coronet of the penny novelette—now sold at a shilling—is not so easy as it was Remember the Old Maids of Lee, and do not wait too long. Do not trifle, at this critical moment, with the love of a man who is, like Lord' Rosebcry's dukes, "honest, but poor." The girl who refuses a good man because he has no future often has to accept a bad man who has a past. Women must, for the moment, give JU> the idea marrying "above them.''

They may even Lave to marry "beneath them." Why not? What more noble task than for a woman to haul up a poor husband to her own splendid level? One more timid hint. Why should not marriage be made a little less expensive? It is up to the women nowadays to make the men understand that ■they are to be wooed as helpers and not as dolls. It is iuit the presents that cost so much. It is the idleness. There has been too much dressing and too little cooking. There have been too many drawing rooms. Leisure and "ladiness" have got too much together. The war has taught women the gospel of work. Lat them carry the lesson into the days of peace. Let marriage be more and more a union of working partners. Why, indeed, should it' not be an actual economy—a step in thrift? "Doubling, the joys and halving the burdens" should be more than a poet's dream. It is time that it became a reality.