For the majority of young men know that nothing worth having is
lost in the sharing. They meet in their own circle some modest,
home-making girl whom they love so truly that they can tell her
exactly what their income is, and then they find out that their own
ideas of economy were crude and extravagant compared with the
wondrous ways and means which reveal themselves to a loving woman's
comprehension of the subject. The Oranges, Rutherford, and every
suburb of New York are full of pretty little homes supported
without worry, and with infinite happiness, upon $1,100 a year,
and perhaps, indeed, upon less money.
The difficulty with the class of young men whose case Mr. Messinger
pleads is one deserving of no sympathy. It is a difficulty evoked by
vanity and self-conceit, of which Fashion and Mrs. Grundy are the
bugbears. Why should a young man capable of making only $1,100 a year
expect to marry a girl whose parents are rich enough to guard her
"from every wind of heaven, lest it visit her face too roughly"? "Is
it fair treatment of the expected husband," Mr. Messinger asks, that a
girl "should be habituated to live without work and then be handed
over to her husband with nothing but her clothing and bric-a-brac?"
Yes, it is quite fair treatment. If the husband with his $1,100 a year
elects to marry a girl not habituated to work, he does it of his own
choice: the father of the girl is probably not at all desirous of his
alliance; then why should the father deprive himself of the results of
his own labor and economy to undo the folly and vanity of the young
man's selection? As for the girl, if she has deliberately preferred
her lover to her father, mother, home, and to all the advantages of
wealth, she has the desire of her heart. It may be quite fair that she
should have this desire, but it may be very unfair that her father,
mother, and perhaps her brothers and sisters, should be robbed to make
her desire less self-sacrificing to her. For if the young man with his
poverty is acceptable to both the daughter and her parents, the latter
may be safely trusted to do all that is right in the circumstances.
The most objectionable part of Mr. Messinger's argument is the servile
and mercenary aspect in which it places marriage. "What equality can
exist," he asks, "where one (the man) supplies all the means of
subsistence and performs all the labor?" That a husband should provide
the means of subsistence is the very Magna Charta of honorable
marriage; and nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand so
accept it. It is the precise point on which all true husbands feel the
most keenly sensitive. They want no other man--no matter what his
relationship or friendship--to support their wives. And under no
circumstances does the husband perform all the labor resulting from a
marriage. That he may be a true man, a father and a citizen, it is
necessary that he have a home; and in the care of the home, in the
bringing-forth and the bringing-up of the family, in the constant
demands upon her love and sympathy, the wife performs a never-ceasing
multitude of duties that tax her heart and her body in every
direction,--a labor of love in comparison with which her husband's
daily routine over his "entries" or his "orders" is a trifling drain
of vitality. For a wife and mother must keep every faculty and feeling
"at attention;" but a clerk over his ledger keeps a dozen faculties
on the premises to do the work of one. And in behalf of all true and
trusted wives I deny in totality the idea that they go to their
husbands with "painful shrinking" for the money necessary to carry on
the mutual home, or that there is in any beloved wife's heart the most
fleeting thought of "dependence." Mr. Messinger does a great and
shameful wrong to the majority of husbands and wives by such an
assertion.
Indeed, this gentleman's experience seems to have been an unusually
sad one, nine out of ten of his friends having died in early middle
age from the undue expenditure of nerve and vital force in their
efforts to provide for their families in what they doubtless
considered a suitable manner; and he evidently thinks that if their
wives had been dowered this result would probably have been averted.
It is extremely improbable. The wife's small income would far more
likely have led to a still more extravagant way of living; for the
genius of the American is to live for to-day and take care for the
morrow when the morrow comes.
In many respects it is the genius of the age. Old forms of thought
and action are in a state of transition. No one can tell what
to-morrow may bring forth. The social conditions which inspired the
fathers of the past to save for their posterity are passing away; and
I speak from knowledge when I assert that they were often conditions
of domestic misery and wrong, and that growing children suffered much
under them. Suppose a father has two daughters and three sons; must he
curtail the daughters in the education and pleasures of their youth,
must he limit the three boys at home and at college, in order to give
a sum of money to some unknown young man who will doubtless vow that
his daughter's heart and person are more than all the world to him? If
she be not more than all the world to him, he has no right to marry
her; and if she be, what can be added to a gift so precious?
The tendency of the time is to dishonor marriage in every way; but
the deepest wrong, the most degrading element that can be introduced,
is to make it dependent upon dowries or any other financial
consideration. We must remember also that in England, where dowry
has been a custom, it was one not particularly affecting those
classes whose daughters are likely to marry clerks upon small
salaries. It was the provision made by landed gentry for their
daughters, and they exacted in return an equally suitable settlement
from the expectant husband. If the father gave a sum of money to
the bride, the bridegroom generally gave the dower-house, with the
furniture, silver, linen, etc., which would make it a proper home for
her widowhood. Many a marriage has been broken off because the
bridegroom would not make such settlements as the father considered
the dower demanded.
Mr. Messinger acknowledges that the cost of living was never so small
as at this day, and that the difficulty in the way of young men
marrying is "purely one of insane imitation and competition." But
there is no necessity for this insane competition; and why provide an
unusual and special remedy for what is purely optional? Nobody compels
the young husband to live as if his income was $11,000 instead of
$1,100. Of his own free will he sacrifices his life to his vanity,
and there is no justice in attempting his relief by dowering his
perhaps equally guilty wife out of the results of another man's
industry and economy.
Dowry is an antiquated provision for daughters, behind the genius of
the age, incompatible with the dignity of American men and the
intelligence and freedom of American women. Besides, there are very
likely to be two, three, four, or more daughters in a house; how could
a man of moderate means save for all of them? And what would become of
the sons? The father who gives his children a loving, sensible mother,
who provides them with a comfortable home, and who educates fully all
their special faculties, and teaches them the cunning in their ten
fingers, dowers his daughters far better than if he gave them money.
He has funded for them a provision that neither a bad husband nor an
evil fate can squander. He has done his full duty, and every good girl
will thankfully so accept it.
As for the young men who could imagine themselves spending, out of
$1,100, $700 upon dress and amusements, neither the world, nor any
sensible woman in it, will be the worse for their celibacy. For if
they take a wife, it will doubtless be some would-be stylish, foolish
virgin, whose soft hands are of no earthly use except as ring-stands
and glove-stretchers. It is such marriages that are failures. It is in
such pretentious homes that love and moderate means cannot live
happily together. It is in such weak hands that Pandora's box shuts,
not on hope, but on despair.
The brave, sensible youth does not fear to face life and all its
obligations on $1,100 a year. With love it is enough to begin with.
Hope, ambition, industry, good fortune, are his sureties for the
future. However well educated he may be, he knows that in his own
class he will find lovely women equally well educated. They may be
teaching, clerking, sewing, but they are his peers. He has no idea of
marrying a young lady accustomed to servants and luxury, and the
question of dower never occurs to him. The good girl who supplements
his industry by her economy, who cheers him with her sympathy, who
shares all his thoughts and feelings, and crowns his life with love
and consolation, has all the dowry he wants. And this is an opinion
founded on a long life of observation,--an opinion that fire cannot
burn out of me.