Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/235

 characteristic international rivalry. When the one country sent forth its choicest youth of the one sex, it could not be long ere the other country would, as matter of course, feel impelled to meet the implied challenge by some equivalent encountering display of the other sex. And thus a practice obtained of the visited country having in readiness a number of the opposite sex about equal to that of the visitors, and selected, as we need hardly add, with due diligence and adequate discrimination. At official receptions, arranged for the purpose, these élite of the two sexes were mutually introduced; and, as might have been expected, the end of it was that, in most cases, the young men did not fail to find wives to their taste, nor the young maids husbands. But the curious result alluded to was more particularly this, that any who might happen to return unmated had presumably failed to encounter excellence equal to their own, and were thus enabled to bring their superiorities safely back for the good of their own kith and kin. When the female sex entered these lists, of course this view of the case was still further enforced by considerations of gallantry. There was, therefore, always the greater triumph to their country, the larger the proportion of its fair ones who came back unsatisfied and unwed.

History has told us that of this famous, and, in all senses of the word, virgin French expedition, not one fair member returned as she came, and thus certain expectations of French triumph were signally disappointed. This, however, was by no means the uniform result; for after the first novelty wore off, and this kind of marital adventure became quite a