WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH OUR GIRLS?

Thames Star, Volume XII, Issue 3963, 10 September 1881, Page 4

WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH OUR GIRLS?

" Civis *' in the Witnesß thus moralises : —The British census totals just published reveal the distressing fact that there are IE the United Kingdom exactly 1,000,000 more women than men. The figures are 17,000,000 males, 18,000,000 females. In all seriousness and Christian Charity I tcall the fact that so enormous a disproportion exists between the sexes a distressing fao. There are a million women in Great Britain who cannot possibly be mated. Try to imagine the heartache, disappointment, and weariness of life represented by this statement. Call up the lament of "Mariana in the mooted grange," waiting and watching for tbe laggard wooer— She.only said " My life is dreary ; : He cometh not," she said; She said ■' I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead !" —and picture a million Marians who hope against hope for the wooer who never comes, and in the nature of things never can come. He never can come for the sufficient reason he doesn't exist. Make every Jack choose his Jill, and there will remain an overplus of a million maidens all forlorn, for whom nature has provided no partners. Now, a million is a very large number. It is more than twice the population of New Zealand. To bring the sexes to an equality, England would have to people two colonies as big as this entirely with women. To keep the equality thus arrived at she would need to export 30,000 single women a year—say a shipload of 600 every week—for ever, which process, according to my arithmetic would remove a million in the lifetime of a generation. Only thus could the embarrassing'prodigality of Nature in the production of women be kept in check. Failing this wholesale expatriation, which I imagine no British statesman will ever have the courage to propose, I forseo rocks ahead. The notion of " v Oman's riffhts " is spreading, and what " woman's, -rights'' is so obvious as a woman's right to a husband ?—(N.B —That is, if she can get one.) Let the feminine mind once grasp the fact that Government statistics doom a million women to go husbandless, and we may expect a formidable agitation against the Government. When the Oalendarjwas altered from Old to New Style, mobs assembled with the demand, " Give us back our eleven days." Conceive the perplexity of an English .Ministry called upon to deal with a League of Compulsory Spinsters, formed to secure equality of the sexes by the abolition of the Census! Either that or polygamy would seem to be on the cards, and, perhaps, if we could divest ourselves of prejudice, IN ature is hinting at the latter as the true remedy.

A master was explaining that the land «f the world was not continuous. He asked a boy, " Now, Jack, could your father walk round the world ?" No, sir, 1' said the boy. " And why ?" " Because he ia dead, sir,."