Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/569

Rh confusion as mere paltry accidents? Oh fie, Mr. Grant Alien!

One more word, as to the supposed effect of the higher education in deterring girls from marriage. I have been engaged in dispensing the higher education to girls for a good many years, and have yet to meet the first one who was the least averse to matrimony; on the contrary, to quote from a composition on "Girls," written by a little friend of mine not long ago, "I think it is the nature of girls to have sweethearts, whether they are little or whether they are big."

The only influence that education can have in "cornering" the matrimonial market is by making girls more fastidious, and this is not likely to have any practical effect except in the case of a few ugly girls. While I do not doubt that all women are just as willing to look pretty as they are to get married, the "factors of organic evolution," which have taken the place of our old-fashioned "providence," have not improved at all upon its methods, but have dealt so unfairly with a large proportion of the sex that, when told by Mr. Grant Allen that their first business is to look pretty, they feel very much as that philosopher probably does when blandly requested by the photographer to "assume a pleasant expression."

Now, as marriage means survival of the prettiest, rather than survival of the fittest (unless we take a purely masculine view of the case and assume that the prettiest are the fittest), all the matrimonial plums fall into the laps of the pretty girls, and the ugly ones have no chance at all but to take everybody's leavings. Of course, I know it is very unreasonable for an ugly girl to ask for any of the plums out of life's pudding; but then, women will be unreasonable, to the end of time—that is one of the factors of the woman question with which we shall always have to reckon. Moreover, the ugly girl sometimes has the presumption to be exceedingly clever, and feels that she can do much better for herself than marry a scrubby little clerk on forty dollars a month. Under the old régime, when marriage was the only possible solution for a woman of the problem of life, she had no choice but to take any man she could get; but now she naturally declines to give up a hundred-dollar salary for a fifty-dollar man. I do not pretend to decide the question whether the general good does not demand that she should still be forced to sacrifice herself in a distasteful marriage, rather than remain single to swell the number of "deplorable accidents" that so weigh upon Mr. Grant Allen's mind. From a human point of view it is undoubtedly for the general good that lobsters should be boiled, but we shall hardly get the lobster to look at it in that light.

Editor Popular Science Monthly:

very much interested in "The Decadence of Farming," which you published in November from the pen of Joel Benton. The picture which he draws of the destruction of the farming interest, both East and West, is a vivid one, and deserves the studied consideration of economists. I do not now say that the statements of facts are overdrawn, that the conclusions drawn are illogical and strained, nor that the condition of affairs, as depicted, can be logically and naturally explained in antagonism to Mr. Benton's conclusions; nor do I stop to point out, now, the facts which his article contains, which, if reasonably interpreted, will nullify his conclusions. My purpose in this letter is to present another picture, not so artistically drawn, it may be, but as true to life, I think, as Mr. Benton's picture.

The daily papers of November 30, 1878, contained a news-telegram from London, dated the 29th. After noticing the condition of trade, the closing of factories, and the reduction of wages, it continued: "Kentish hop-growers say, 'As the general depression of agriculture and commerce is largely caused by the protective tariffs of other countries, the duties on foreign productions should be revived.'"

I do not know the political views of the reporter of that dispatch; but the Associated Press reports are presumed to be nonpartisan.

The New York correspondent of the Cincinnati "Enquirer," under date of December 12, 1878, sends to his paper the report of an interview with Mr. Armour, the noted dealer and packer of meats, of Chicago, who had just returned from an extended tour in Great Britain. In the reported interview Mr. Armour said: "The manufacturers are running behind, the tenants can not pay their rents, real estate has shrunk in value and can not be sold at any price... . The shrinkage is awful... . The hard times," he said, "will end in a dreadful depreciation of real estate."

I do not know the politics of Mr. Armour; the "Enquirer" represents the theory of "free trade."

The Chicago "Tribune" of July 8, 1879, reprinted from the New York "Herald" an editorial in regard to English affairs, in which the "Herald" said, "The agricultural depression in Great Britain has been felt for a long time very severely by the tenant farmers." The "Herald" then quoted from the "Pall Mall Gazette" that "the prevalent belief as to the severity of the depression existing in English agriculture will be confirmed by figures recently produced before the Devizes Union Assessment Committee."

The three papers mentioned in this paragraph represent free-trade ideas.