May I beg for the favor of your presentation to Christ's
Hospital for my youngest son, M. N.? I have nine children,
and no means to educate them. I ventured to address you,
believing that my husband's name is not unknown to you as
an artist.
Believe me to remain faithfully yours,
* * *
120. Now this letter is only a typical example of the entire class of
those which, being a governor of Christ's Hospital, I receive, in
common with all the other governors, at the rate of about three a day,
for a month or six weeks from the date of our names appearing in the
printed list of the governors who have presentations for the current
year. Having been a governor now some twenty-five years, I have
documentary evidence enough to found some general statistics upon;
from which there have resulted two impressions on my mind, which I
wish here specially to note to you, and I do not doubt but that all
the other governors, if you could ask them, would at once confirm what
I say. My first impression is, a heavy and sorrowful sense of the
general feebleness of intellect of that portion of the British public
which stands in need of presentations to Christ's Hospital. This
feebleness of intellect is mainly shown in the nearly total
unconsciousness of the writers that anybody else may want a
presentation, besides themselves. With the exception here and there
of a soldier's or a sailor's widow, hardly one of them seems to have
perceived the existence of any distress in the world but their own:
none know what they are asking for, or imagine, unless as a remote
contingency, the possibility of its having been promised at a prior
date. The second most distinct impression on my mind, is that the
portion of the British public which is in need of presentations to
Christ's Hospital considers it a merit to have large families, with or
without the means of supporting them!
121. Now it happened also (and remember, all this is strictly true,
nor in the slightest particular represented otherwise than as it
chanced; though the said chance brought thus together exactly the
evidence I wanted for my letter to you)--it happened, I say, that on
this same morning of the 10th April, I became accidentally acquainted
with a case of quite a different kind: that of a noble girl, who,
engaged at sixteen, and having received several advantageous offers
since, has remained for ten years faithful to her equally faithful
lover; while, their circumstances rendering it, as they rightly
considered, unjustifiable in them to think of marriage, each of them
simply and happily, aided and cheered by the other's love, discharged
the duties of their own separate positions in life.
122. In the nature of things, instances of this kind of noble life
remain more or less concealed, (while imprudence and error proclaim
themselves by misfortune,) but they are assuredly not unfrequent in
our English homes. Let us next observe the political and national
result of these arrangements. You leave your marriages to be settled
by "supply and demand," instead of wholesome law. And thus, among your
youths and maidens, the improvident, incontinent, selfish, and foolish
ones marry, whether you will or not; and beget families of children
necessarily inheritors in a great degree of these parental
dispositions; and for whom, supposing they had the best dispositions
in the world, you have thus provided, by way of educators, the
foolishest fathers and mothers you could find; (the only rational
sentence in their letters, usually, is the invariable one, in which
they declare themselves "incapable of providing for their children's
education"). On the other hand, whosoever is wise, patient, unselfish,
and pure among your youth, you keep maid or bachelor; wasting their
best days of natural life in painful sacrifice, forbidding them their
best help and best reward, and carefully excluding their prudence and
tenderness from any offices of parental duty.
Is not this a beatific and beautifully sagacious system for a
Celestial Empire, such as that of these British Isles?
123. I will not here enter into any statement of the physical laws
which it is the province of our physicians to explain; and which are
indeed at last so far beginning to be understood, that there is hope
of the nation's giving some of the attention to the conditions
affecting the race of man, which it has hitherto bestowed only on
those which may better its races of cattle.
It is enough, I think, to say here that the beginning of all sanitary
and moral law is in the regulation of marriage, and that, ugly and
fatal as is every form and agency of license, no licentiousness is so
mortal as licentiousness in marriage.
124. Briefly, then, and in main points, subject in minor ones to such
modifications in detail as local circumstances and characters would
render expedient, those following are laws such as a prudent nation
would institute respecting its marriages. Permission to marry should
be the reward held in sight of its youth during the entire latter part
of the course of their education; and it should be granted as the
national attestation that the first portion of their lives had been
rightly fulfilled. It should not be attainable without earnest and
consistent effort, though put within the reach of all who were willing
to make such effort; and the granting of it should be a public
testimony to the fact, that the youth or maid to whom it was given
had lived, within their proper sphere, a modest and virtuous life, and
had attained such skill in their proper handicraft, and in arts of
household economy, as might give well-founded expectations of their
being able honorably to maintain and teach their children.
125. No girl should receive her permission to marry before her
seventeenth birthday, nor any youth before his twenty-first; and it
should be a point of somewhat distinguished honor with both sexes to
gain their permission of marriage in the eighteenth and twenty-second
years; and a recognized disgrace not to have gained it at least before
the close of their twenty-first and twenty-fourth. I do not mean that
they should in any wise hasten actual marriage; but only that they
should hold it a point of honor to have the right to marry. In every
year there should be two festivals, one on the first of May, and one
at the feast of harvest home in each district, at which festivals
their permissions to marry should be given publicly to the maidens and
youths who had won them in that half-year; and they should be crowned,
the maids by the old French title of Rosieres, and the youths, perhaps
by some name rightly derived from one supposed signification of the
word "bachelor," "laurel fruit," and so led in joyful procession, with
music and singing, through the city street or village lane, and the
day ended with feasting of the poor.
126. And every bachelor and rosiere should be entitled to claim, if
they needed it, according to their position in life, a fixed income
from the State, for seven years from the day of their marriage, for
the setting up of their homes; and, however rich they might be by
inheritance, their income should not be permitted to exceed a given
sum, proportioned to their rank, for the seven years following that in
which they had obtained their permission to marry, but should
accumulate in the trust of the State until that seventh year, in which
they should be put (on certain conditions) finally in possession of
their property; and the men, thus necessarily not before their
twenty-eighth, nor usually later than their thirty-first year, become
eligible to offices of State. So that the rich and poor should not be
sharply separated in the beginning of the war of life; but the one
supported against the first stress of it long enough to enable them,
by proper forethought and economy, to secure their footing; and the
other trained somewhat in the use of moderate means, before they were
permitted to have the command of abundant ones. And of the sources
from which these State incomes for the married poor should be
supplied, or of the treatment of those of our youth whose conduct
rendered it advisable to refuse them permission to marry, I defer what
I have to say till we come to the general subjects of taxation and
criminal discipline; leaving the proposals made in this letter to
bear, for the present, whatever aspect of mere romance and
unrealizable vision they probably may, and to most readers, such as
they assuredly will. Nor shall I make the slightest effort to redeem
them from these imputations; for though there is nothing in all their
purport which would not be approved, as in the deepest sense
"practical"--by the Spirit of Paradise--
"Which gives to all the self-same bent,
Whose lives are wise and innocent,"
and though I know that national justice in conduct, and peace in
heart, could by no other laws be so swiftly secured, I confess with
much _dis_peace of heart, that both justice and happiness have at this
day become, in England, "romantic impossibilities."