第99章 ASSISTANCE IN GENERAL.(12)

While I have been busily occupied in working out my Scheme for the registration of labour,it has occurred to me more than once,why could not something like the same plan be adopted in relation to men who want wives and women who want husbands?Marriage is with most people largely a matter or opportunity.Many a man and many a woman,who would,if they had come together,have formed a happy household,are leading at this moment miserable and solitary lives,suffering in body and in soul,in consequence of their exclusion from the natural state of matrimony.Of course,the registration of the unmarried who wish to marry would be a matter of much greater delicacy than the registration of the joiners and stone-masons who wish to obtain work.But the thing is not impossible.I have repeatedly found in my experience that many a man and many a woman would only be too glad to have a friendly hint as to where they might prosecute their attentions or from which they might receive proposals.In connection with such an agency,if it were established--for I am mot engaging to undertake this task--I am only throwing out a possible suggestion as to the development in the direction of meeting a much needed want,there might be added training homes for matrimony.My heart bleeds for many a young couple whom I see launching out into the sea of matrimony with no housewifery experience.The young girls who leave our public elementary schools and go out into factories have never been trained to home duties,and yet,when taken to wife,are unreasonably expected to fill worthily the difficult positions of the head of a household and the mother of a family.A month spent before marriage in a training home of housewifery would conduce much more to the happiness of the married life than the honeymoon which immediately follows it.

Especially is this the case with those who marry to go abroad and settle in a distant country.I often marvel when I think of the utter helplessness of the modern woman,compared with the handiness of her grandmother.How many of our girls can even bake a loaf?The baker has killed out one of our fundamental domestic arts.But if you are in the Backwoods or in the Prairie or in the Bush,no baker's cart comes round every morning with the new-made bread,and I have often thought with sorrow of the kind of stuff which this poor wife must serve up to her hungry husband.As it is with baking,so it is with washing,with milking,with spinning,with all the arts and sciences of the household,which were formerly taught,as a matter of course,to all the daughters who were born in the world.Talk about woman's rights,one of the first of woman's rights is to be trained to her trade,to be queen of her household,and mother of her children.

Speaking of colonists leads me to the suggestion whether something could not be done to supply,on a well-organised system,the thousands of bachelor miners or the vast host of unmarried males who are struggling with the wilderness on the outskirts of civilisation,with capable wives from the overplus of marriageable females who abound in our great towns.Woman supplied in adequate quantities is the great moraliser of Society,but woman doled out as she is in the Far West and the Australian bush,in the proportion of one woman to about a dozen men,is a fertile source of vice and crime.Here again we must get back to nature,whose fundamental laws our social arrangements have rudely set on one side with consequences which as usual she does not fail to exact with remorseless severity.There have always been born into the world and continue to be born boys and girls in fairly equal proportions,but with colonising and soldiering our men go away,leaving behind them a continually growing surplus of marriageable but unmarried spinsters,who cannot spin,and who are utterly unable to find themselves husbands.This is a wide field on the discussion of which I must not enter.I merely indicate it as one of those departments in which an intelligent philanthropy might find a great sphere for its endeavours;but it would be better not to touch it at all than to deal with it with light-hearted precipitancy and without due consideration of all the difficulties and dangers connected therewith.Obstacles,however,exist to be overcome and converted into victories.There is even a certain fascination about the difficult and dangerous,which appeals very strongly to all who know that it is the apparently insolvable difficulty which contains within its bosom the key to the problem which you are seeking to solve.

SECTION 8.--WHITECHAPEL-BY-THE-SEA.

In considering the various means by which some substantial improvement can be made in the condition of the toiling masses,recreation cannot be omitted.I have repeatedly had forced upon me the desirability of making it possible for them to spend a few hours occasionally by the seaside,or even at times three or four days.Notwithstanding the cheapened rates and frequent excursions,there are multitudes of the poor who,year in and out,never get beyond the crowded city,with the exception of dragging themselves and their children now and then to the parks on holidays or hot summer evenings.The majority,especially the inhabitants of the East of London,never get away from the sunless alleys and grimy streets in which they exist from year to year.

It is true that a few here and there of the adult population,and a good many of the children,have a sort of annual charity excursion to Epping Forest,Hampton Court,or perhaps to the sea.But it is only the minority.The vast number,while possessed of a passionate love of the sea,which only those who have mixed with them can conceive,pass their whole lives without having once looked over its blue waters,or watched its waves breaking at their feet.