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might have the chance of meeting eligible young men, and that you took her out with the same object."-"Well, yes; and I see no harm in it."-"Of course not. But please notice, then, that we have come to this. You want Agnes to marry a rich man, and you take her out and give parties in order that a rich man may meet her and marry her. Now, admitting this, and knowing, that as you hint every one else does the same, I want to know, Mrs. Bowling, whether you can deny that there such a thing as the Belgravian marriage market, and that you keep a stall in it with your daughter Agnes on sale? I have, as you will I am sure acknowledge, asserted nothing myself but merely arrange more clearly the facts admitted by you." Poor Mrs. Bowling's reply to the final question of the female Socrates may, we think, be more easily imagined than set forth. Probably it would be firm and incoherent, and something on this model: “I'm sure I never said anything of the kind, and I don't know what you mean except that I know all this talk about a marriage market is all nonsense and very vulgar too, and not the sort of thing that nice people ever have any thing to do with, and what puts such things into your head, Miss Porchester, I really can't think. How can you know? You've never been married yourself and had children. If you had, you'd think very differently. Don't, please, tell me it was I who said there was a marriage market. I never did. You evidently did not understand me; it's like the second-class society papers that Agnes says her maid tells her things out of. No; I won't argue it out again, it makes one so hot, and really, indeed, you can't understand anything about it, even if you are older and have read a great deal more than many married women. It's like servants. As cook says about Agnes when she's doing the housekeeping. 'Young ladies never exactly understand.' Well, I really feel quite confused with all the questions you've asked me, and I'm sure you ought to have been a great lawyer. You would have done splen

didly when it was necessary to make witnesses say something they didn't mean to. At any rate, you may be quite sure I'd much rather Agnes married a poor man who would be really nice to her than a rich one who wouldn't. That goes without saying. Only, unfortunately, all the poor men aren't good, as the people who write to the magazines seem to think. Of course, the rich men aren't always good either. I'm afraid, indeed, that it's pure chance with both."

A Socratic dialogue such as we have just given would very aptly sum up the general result of the modern aspects of the eternal marriage market controversy. It can apparently be shown that something like a marriage market exists, in which the mothers try to sell their daughters to the best advantage; and yet all the time it is quite obvious that the mothers are doing nothing of the kind, but are only trying to get their daughters "comfortably settled," -a very natural and very sensible action. In truth there is more foolish nonsense written about the marriage market than on any other subject under heaven. In the first place, the analogy is altogether a false one. How can a person be said to sell when she gets nothing by the sale, for except in very rare cases the mother gets nothing tangible by her daughter's marriage? Of course occasionally a mother does force her daughter to marry a rich man against her will, or insists upon her abandoning a poor one. As a rule, however, it is the want of money sufficient to keep a wife, not the machinations of the mother, which defeats the poor man. If, though poor, he is in a position to marry, and the young lady is really anxious to become his wife, the mother may tell her daughter she is an idiot, but she can do little else. Very often we may suspect that the tales of the mothers selling their unhappy daughters to wealthy men, and so robbing the poor of their natural prizes are invented by poor men as salves to their wounded feelings. It is pleasanter to think that the girl was sold by

her mother, than to admit that, when climb the world's ladder by marriage.

she had to face the question of living with Mr. Brown in a hut on water and a crust, she concluded that it was not worth while. A good deal of very sensible talk about the whole subject of the alleged marriage market is to be found in Lady Jeune's article in the Lady's Realm for April entitled "The Modern Marriage Market; a Reply to Marie Corelli." Lady Jeune shows how absurd the whole accusation is, and traverses with special success the ridiculous suggestion that girls are as much brought in the season to be sold "as any unhappy Armenian girl." No doubt a certain amount of the London festivities are primarily arranged to give young people the chance of seeing -each other, but to call this a female slave market is mere midsummer madness. The truth about the whole question is, we believe, something of this kind. A certain number of women marry solely for love. A certain, and perhaps larger, number marry for reasons in which love and the desire to have a home of their own and money of their own are mixed up. Another small section marry purely from reasons of ambition, usually of a pecuniary kind,-i.e., with the idea of becoming great personages through marriage. As a rule, however, these mercenary marriages are made not by a designing mother who wishes to sell her daughter, but by a designing, or rather ambitious, girl who deliberately wishes to

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The girls who deliberately try to better their position by marriage are, however, by no means necessarily despicable people. A few are. Those, for example, who deliberately marry rich men of known bad character, very old men, or men of feeble intellect, or men they dislike. The majority, however. are very like the ambitious men who deliberately prefer getting on by marriage to marrying for other considerations, and so choose a rich wife. Theoretically, these must be rather pleasant and repulsive people. As a matter of fact, however, they are often nothing of the kind, and end by making very good husbands. So is it with thousands of the girls who are said to sell themselves for money. We do not, of course, want to defend mercenary marriages, and we detest the notion of girls being brought up to think that money is the only object in life. It is. however, absolutely necessary to speak out about the current cant concerning the marriage market. That, as a rule. is mere rhetoric, and when it means anything, means that most naturally mothers, other things being equal, prefer that their daughters should be without pecuniary cares. Our Mrs. Bowling puts the feeling quite correctly when she says that if she does not know either of the men, she prefers the rich one. Depend upon it, indigence and virtue are no more convertible terms than riches and vice.

A Striking Contrast.-In the biography of the late Sir Henry Parkes is recorded the following comparison which the Australian statesman himself made between his own early life and that of Mr. Gladstone:

I was thinking, he said on one occasion, of a comparison between Mr. Gladstone's life and my own. When he was at Eton, preparing himself for Oxford, enjoying all the advantages of a good education, with plenty of money, and being trained in every way for his

future position as a statesman, I was working on a ropewalk at 4d. per day, and suffered such cruel treatment that I was knocked down with a crowbar and did not recover my senses for half an hour. From the ropewalk I went to labor in a brickyard, where I was again brutally used; and when Mr. Gladstone was at Oxford I was breaking stones on the queen's highway with hardly enough clothing to protect me from the cold.

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From Cosmopolis.

LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS.

Authors complain, and in many cases complain justly, of the large number of letters and visits which they receive from unknown friends and distant admirers. I myself, though the subjects on which I write are not exactly popular, have been sitting at the receipt of such custom for many years. It is difficult to know what to do. To answer all the letters, even to acknowledge all the books that are sent to me from India, Australia, New Zealand, from every new sphere of influence in Africa, from America, North and South, and from the principal countries of Europe, would be physically impossible. A simple knowledge of arithmetic would teach my friends that if I were only to glance at a book in order to give an opinion, or say something pleasant about it, one hour at least of my time in the morning would certainly be consumed by every single book. Every writer imagines that he is the only one who writes a letter, asks a question, or sends a book; but he forgets that in this respect everybody has as much right as everybody else, and claims it too, unmindful of the rights of others, and quite unconscious that the sum total of such interruptions would swallow up the whole of a man's working day. And there is this further danger: however guarded one may be in expressing one's gratitude or one's opin ion of the merits of a book, one's letter is apt to appear in advertisements, if only far away in India or the Colonies; nay, we often find that the copy of a book was not even sent us by the author himself, but with the author's compliments, that is by an enterprising publisher.

However, there is a compensation in all things, and I gladly confess that I have occasionally derived great advantage from the letters of my unknown friends. They have sent me valuable corrections and useful remarks for my books, they have made me presents of manuscripts and local publications difficult to get even at the Bodleian and the British Museum, and I feel sure they

have not been offended even though I could not enter into a long correspondence with every one of my epistolary friends on the origin of language or the home of the Aryan race. My worst friends are those who send me their own writings and wish me to give an opinion, or to find a publisher for them. Had I attempted to comply with onetenth of these requests, I could have done nothing else in life. What would become of me if everybody who cannot find a publisher were to write to me. The introduction of postcards has proved, no doubt, a great blessing to all who are supposed to be oracles, but even an oracular response takes time. Speaking for myself, I may truly say that I often feel tempted to write to a man who is an authority on a special subject on which I want information. I know he could answer my question in five minutes, and yet I hardly ever venture to make the appeal, but go to a 11brary, where I have to waste hours and hours in finding the right book, and afterwards the right passage in it.

And what applies to letters applies to personal visits also. I do sometimes get impatient when perfect strangers call on me without any kind of introduction, sometimes even without a visiting card, and then sit down to propound some theory of their own. Still, taking all in all, I must not complain of my visitors. They do not come in shoals like letters and books, and very often they are interesting and even delightful. Many of them come from America, and the mere fact that they want to see me is a compliment which I appreciate. They have read my books, that is another compliment which I always value; and they often speak to me of things that years ago I have said in some article of mine, and which I myself have often quite forgotten.

It strikes me that Americans possess in a very high degree the gift of sightseeing. They possess what at school was called pace. They travel over England in a fortnight, but at the end they seem to have seen all that is, and all who are worth seeing. We wonder

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