Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/232

 passports or letters of general introduction, which would give them free ingress abroad to the best society. These letters were more than a mere form; they were the result of proper and careful inquiry and evidence as to character and attainments. There were thus, of course, great facilities for the meeting of the élite of the sexes, and there was a charm of novelty and piquancy in the whole case which helped much to promote the many life agreements that were the consequence. In short, our young adventurer most commonly returned with a foreign wife; while the State, backed by medical science, gave no unhesitating approval of this most genial international habit.

But after a time this practice took a new and still enlarging direction, and a direction which was eventually more specially associated with the term "international." The practice, in fact, now become general with the one sex, at length extended to the other. At first, of course, the excursionists had been, without exception, of the stronger sex. The bare idea of any young lady embarking on such a cruise, unmistakably, as it must have been interpreted, in search of a husband, seemed quite intolerable to the proper delicacy of the sex. But it is marvellous how good common-sense, as to the actual needs and wants and reasonable desires of life, comes at last to prevail. As regarded the young men, there was soon no affectation of disguise that the main object was a nice foreign wife. Was the other sex really less interested on the same subject? Evidently the woman's rights question was to come up once more here. As year succeeded year, opinion seemed to get riper, and