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18
[1909
more ardently than their fathers and grandfathers, and they think less of
making homes of their own. They like the pleasure of ladies' society, but
they forego its natural corollary, marriage. No doubt nearly all of them say to
themselves they will get married some day, when their business is larger, when
their salaries are higher, or when they have had their "fling." Unfortunately,
however, as they grow older, the idea of marriage looms before them less
brightly, its attractions seem less vivid, and the idea of children is repellent,
so that many who put off the wedding feast until a more convenient season
never enjoy it at all, and remain bachelors unto the end.
There is no reason to think that females are equally inclined. The reasonable
outlook for every woman is marriage, and as in the economy of life, nature
intended that every male and female should be mated, it is natural that it
should be so. It is the male who has cried off, and who, while he does not fail
to extract all the innocent amusement he can out of her, meanly delays,
or declines altogether, the mating in marriage. It is for this reason that many
seriously-minded persons think that such men should be taxed, for they neither
pay their just dues to the state nor to the municipalities in taxes or
rates, in rents, or in the hundred and one other directions which paterfamilias
understands. A tax on bachelors is, therefore, not such an unreasonable
or probably remote matter as might be supposed. In any case, such a
tax would not be so unpleasant as the punishment under the law of Lycurgus,
which to an extent disfranchised those who continued bachelors, for they were
excluded from the sight of certain processions of young men and maids
intended to promote marriage, and in winter time the officers compelled them
to march naked round the market-place, singing certain songs to their own
disgrace, that they justly suffered this punishment for disobeying the laws.
Moreover, they were denied that respect and deference which young men
usually pay to their seniors. Indeed, this was carried to such an extent by the
younger men that on the approach of Dercyllidas, an eminent commander,
one of them instead of rising retained his seat, remarking "No child of yours
will make room for me." Nor did he suffer any rebuke for so saying, for in
those days it was looked upon as a dishonourable thing not to be married.
The Registrar General, in his report for 1908 gives a table which
shows that, in the five years 1886-1890, in every 1000 bachelors who
married, 424 were between 21 and 25 years of age, whereas in 1908 the
number was only 379; that in the former period between the ages of 30 and
35 there were 96 in every 1000, while in 1908 the number had increased to
130; also that in the age period 40-45 in 1886-90 there were 33, while the
number had risen risen to 44 in 1908.