LOVE IN A COTTAGE.

Observer, Volume v, Issue 115, 25 November 1882, Page 170

LOVE IN A CO TTA GE.

" Lovo in a hufc< with water and a crust, Is — love, forgive us ! cinders, ashes, dust." Some members of a Southern Synod expressed the hope the other day that by abolishing marriage fees they would increase the number of marriages. It is said that in England the marriage rate rises with a halfpenny decline in the price of bread, but things can hardly be cut so fine in this country. Eee3 or no fee 3, a man in the colonies will get married when he wants to get married, and when the right woman will have him. It is only a mean hound, who would stop to calculate whether he could or could not afford to pay the parson. All women, at any rate, will agree in that opinion. What hinders marriage is not the question of marriage fees, but the question of house, and servants, and drapers' bills. Lower the standard of comfort, and you might increase the marriage rate, but we hardly fancy that would be a good thing. Love in a cottage may do for cottagers, but it won't work in other ranks of life. And even for cottagers, love alone is scanty fare. In Ireland the "love in a cottage " theory forced the people down upon the potato as their staff of life, and when the potato failed them there was nothing for it but to die of famine. In some parts of Germany marriage is encouraged by the facilities which exist for divorce. In Transylvania, for example, it is said that two out of every three girls who get married are divorced before the end of the year, and that most married women have had three husbands. Here is a picture from a recent book of travel of the state of things in Saxony : — " A separation of husband and wife after three, four, or even six weeks' marriage is nothing rare or strange ; and the woman divorced will often want six or eight months of being 16. Among a portion of the Saxons, marriage may almost be said to be a merely temporary arrangement between two contracting parties ; very frequently neither expects it to last long, and may have resolved that it shall not. In a village near the Kochel, 16 marriages took place in one year ; at the end of twelve months only six of the contracting parties were still living together. In the j)lace where I write this there are at this moment eleven bridal pairs intending to celebrate their wedding a fortnight hence. Of these ■ eleven, the schoolmaster observed that there would probably not be many living together by this time next year. The clergyman, too, was of opinion that before long many would come to him with grounds for a separation. Divorce is easy, and belongs so intimately to married life that even before the wedding it is talked of, and under certain probable eventualities looked forward to as consequent on the approaching union." In this country " love in a cottage " does not end in divorce, perhaps, but it often ends in the running away of the husband, and the handing over of the wife and children to public charity. The priests of all churches like an active marriage market, but they are bad political economists. If they were wise, they would try to raise the standard of comfort, ■ not to lower it, and would encourage only such marriages as are likely to last.