The Express.
London, England, 1861-07-22 00:00:00

?PORTING LNIIILLIGE-NCE.

A late edition of the E"press is published every
eveoirg during the racing season, containing the
results of the day's races.

Ac often as 9%1..0i-female voices are heard com-
plaining through the press of the stubbornness
of the bachelors, of the at once Epicurean and
economical spirit of the age, and of the increasing
difficulty of disposing of daughters in the holy
bonds of matrimony, the " social evil" is
brought forward to account for the embarrass-
ment. A monster evil it is ; but it has so
long existed amongst ns that one does not
see how it is chargeable with any growing reltie-
tame of the higher class of Englishmen to wive. We
say " higher," for in the ranks employed in active
industry, untroubled by ideas of caste or fashion,
the complaint is not made. Although the " social
evil " must spread its temptations for the young
ahopman or the superior artisan, it is never pre-
tended that it can compete with or obstruct that
desire for a home, and that respect for family ties,
in which alone a sane man can imagine happiness.
Where there are position and fortune, the
advantages of the marriage state over an irregular
mode of life are still more manifest, so much so
that the latter can scarcely ever be the result of
deliberate choice. An unhappy chance, or
disappointment and recklessness, can alone
drive men to the pironer. And writers, when
they comr ire the two kinds of life, and represent
the attractions of the one as seriously damaging
the other, take a tales and selfish view of marriage,
whilst they as ignorantly, we hope, exaggerate the
advantages of unlicensed unions.

We should be inclined to attribute the paucity
of marriages in a certain class of life, to a social
evil of quite a different kind, to the pride and ex-
clusiveness of the circle from which the complaints
are supposed to come, to the eternal straining of
eyes upwards, and never casting them down—in
a word, to the circumstance of the ladies of gentle
rank refusing to take account of those levelling and
lowering changes which have been at work in the
upper strata of society, and which the male portion
of it have been obliged to recognise.
Years back the clam of English gentry might be
measured by the landed rental of the country. On
it, and iroon the patronage which it could com-
mand, thi: class subsisted. What are the revenues
of land now compared with the annual
wealth of tho country And how different
are the laws which govern the economical state of
society then and now ! Then, a young man's
expectations and prospects were a sum in plain
arithmetic ; the few who made fortunes and rose to
eminence from obscurity used to be objects of
wonder and heroes of domestic fable. At the
present day, of what is composed the great mass
of Englishmen, even of the well-born Of a
struggling crowd of hopers, striven, and earners.
The prizes are a thousandfold in number of what
they used to be, and so are the competitors. It
Is a beneficent rule of nature that women are born
as nearly as possible in proportion to men. Each
human being can find his partner in the opposite
sex. But the young women are taught to look ex-
clusively to such partners as the old state of society
sufficiently provided, but which in the new form
not a hundredth part of the developed race. They
want assured fortune, fixed property, rental. This
forms not one-tenth even of that class of men who
will assuredly one day enjoy comfortable incomes
and prosperous living. The consequence is that
men must wait to marry ; but in waiting they get
fastidious, and young women become more fasti-
dious towards them, so that in the end they often
do not marry at all.
All this can be reduced to a formula. As long as
the higher class of the country consist of youths of
" certain prospects" and landed property, they
can marry early. And as they give the tone to
society, other youths contrive to marry young also.

When the majority of young men of a country
are earners, and have only " prospects" to
offer, whilst young women will not accept such
uncertainties, the girls of the generation in which
the change takes place go without husbands, men
waiting and taking younger girls as they can get
them. When the transition is complete the female
generation adapt themselves to it. But the period
of transition is hard, except to those who are wise
enough to discern that it is an abnormal epoch.
Nor are parents having fixed and assured property
the only parents who look to nothing less than assured
and ample fortunes for their daughters. The great
struggle of a considerable portion of the earning
class itself is to get out of the society of earners and
enter the higher circles, where assured fortune is
alone admitted. What is the consequence ? That
they are looked down upon and set aside by the
society into which they thrust themselves, whilst
they are ignored by the class to which they really
belong. Is it to be wondered at that girls thus
treated remain spinsters I Nor are the parents to
be pitied for ',lacing their children in those posi-
tions where there are literally no prizes for them
in the wheel of fortune.

Our contemporaries threw the great blame of
paucity of marriage upon the "social evil." It
would be more just, perhaps, to attribute the
" social evil " to the paucity and difficulty of
marriage. There is a country peopled by our race,
where this evil is scarcely known to exist.
What kills itf Early marriage, the fair prospects
of every youth, the absence of rules of caste and
prohibitions of fashion which permits, if we may
be allowed the expression, free trade in marriage.
It is proposed to remedy the great canker by ex-
erting the omnipotence of fashion, and making it
open its anathemas against those men of fashion who
indulge in " temporary connexions." We may be
sure that fashion does its utmost to punish them.
But fashion is powerless in this case, for it is the
voice of the wealthy, the well-born, the young, and
we may add of the self-indulgent. Better far for
the end in view it would be to banish fashion
altogether, and put common sense, fair equality,
and manly morality in its place.
It would be very easy to enumerate a host of
causes which in the present age apparently mili-
tate against marriage. There are clubs that
make bachelors comfortable, and give them society
without the trouble of seeking it—there is the
Divorce Court, and the reports of the cases
brought before it, as much calculated to
terrify the single world from entering the
marriage state, as clubs are to induce them to
dispense with it. But the heart of man is no:.
made to be satisfied with substitutes for what it
naturally aspires to. Clubs and divorce courts
will not prevent young men from marrying ; but
absurd social pride and artificial social obstacles
may do that which nothing else can. As to
the sorrows of Belgravia, real or imaginary, they
deserve no sympathy. If Belgravian spinsters
fume, or Belgravian mothers fret, let theirs be
the punishment, as theirs is the fault.

A suctrr continues to rest upon commercial en-
terprise throughout the kingdom. There is an
almost universal complaint that business is dull,
profits small, and money tight. Money is tight in
a sense somewhat different from that in which the
term is understood in Lombard-street. Every
person who has to make payments delays doing so
as long as is decent or possible, chiefly because
this is the way in which he is himself served by
his debtors. Neither do stocks of goods
move off with the ordinary freedom. N% net-
ever encouraging inferences may be extracted
from the general statistics of trade, there is
no doubt whatever that it has lost its
elasticity, and that considerable disappointment is
at present felt by the mercantile public, by whom,
individually and collectively, a steady and con-
stant increase in transactions and in profits is re-
garded as the natural condition of business in •
thriving community like ours. Although the aggre-
gate of the transactions of the nation is still very
large, this condition of progress is now wanting.
Its absence is to be traced in • great
Immure to the failure of the last har-
vest, and to the vast expenditure which
that calamity has entailed on us as a nation. In
the first place, there is the foreign aspect of the
outlay. It is true that we import every year a
very large quantity of food, the supply raised at
home being uniformly inadequate to the wants of
our teeming population. It is only when the tribute
which we pay to the foreigner for food increases
greatly that we feel any pressure. We would ask
our readers' attention to the statistics of the im-
ports of breadstulls, because they exhibit at •
glance the real causes of the present paralysis of
enterprise. The imports of grain of all kinds, as
well as flour, for the last seven years have been as
follows:

OZADI AND nova.

bepoirle la 11154 i 31,780.283
„ 1885 17,508,700
„ 1864. WA:81,422
„ 1987 19,380,867
MS 15,152,811
„ 18911....... ..............

Total is NM years .111111,883.4176
Annual average for six year Y 19,1180,613
Imports in 1860 111,671,918
Now, the nation was not at all distressed by being
required to pay the heavy sum of 119,883,8761.
to the foreigner for grain and sour 'during the six
years first referred to. It will be noticed that for
that period the average annual amount was almost
exactly twenty millions sterling. This sum appears
very large, but we have set it down as a regular
item of the national outlay, have provided for it,
and do not feel the strain in the least. Twenty
millions a year for breadstuf . is quite in the ordi-
nary count, of trade, and but for this the numerous

States which supply us would probably be com-
pelled to go without • large portion of the useful
commodities wherewith our manufacturers square
the account. It is interesting to remark, too, that,
with the exception of the year 1855, when the
grain imports sank 2,471,9131. below the six
years' average (namely, to 17,508,7001.), and of
1856, when they rose 3,058,809/. above it(namely,
to 23,039,4221.), the extreme variation has been
only between 18,042,0631. in 1859, as
tbs lowest, and 21,780,2831., in 1854, as the
highest annual amount. But 1860 has gained for
itself quite • distinctive character as a year of
heavy imports—that is to say, of seriously enlarged
foreign outlay. Instead of 19,980,613/., the
average amount for the six years, we were obliged
to import in 1860 31,671,9181. of breadstuff*.
The difference is no leas than 11,691,305/. Com-
, paring the imports of 1860 with those o 1859,
the increase is larger 13,629,8551. It
must be obvious to the merest tyro in political
economy that a difference of twelve or fourteen
millions sterling in the disbursements for a single
article of consumption must make an immense
difference in the power of the nation to consume
other articles. And if it goes on eating, drink-
ing, and consnming other commodities at the
usual rate, forgetful of the exceptional strain
which these large imports entail, it is
guilty of extravagance, which must be atoned for