PANIC OF BACHELORS.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9163, 11 August 1908, Page 7

PANIC OF BACHELORS.

The Kaiser's hint in his recent Hamburg .speech regarding a tax on bachelors was not meant to b* taken seriously; but it sent a distinct shudder of apprehension through the ranks of Germany's five million unmarried men. They argue that the Kaiser was not given to joking in his speeches, . and regard as very real the danger of being called upon to bear a substantial share of the £22,500,000 new taxes which the Imperial Government desires to levy. According to • the census of 1900—-the latest figures available—4,6o4,oos males over twenty were then treading the lonely pnths of single blessedness, while there were 5,023,136 singe women of •over eighteen. Keckoning twenty years as the average age when Germans begin to think of matrimony, the unmarried element in the Fatherland on December Ist, 1900, represented 15.31 per cent, of the population. A spction of the Press treats the Kaiser's hint seriously, intimating—in German idiom—that "when the devil is hungry he eats flies." But tbe-Psess disapproves of the idea as unfair class legislation. One journal suggests that if such a tax is imposed complement would be the? imposition of an equal hei>vy tax on fortune-hunters.