New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1871-01-21
EARLY MARRIAGES..


An England is stirred to its foundations
just now by step which the Directors of the
London Union Bank have seen fit to take for
the prevention of too early, and therefore
imprudent, marriages among their clerks.
Any employe of the establishment venturing
to treat himself to a wife upon a salary of
less than ESQ year is to be summarily dis
missed. The clerks seem willing to submit
meekly enough but the edict has reused the
indignation of the British public from one end
of the Island to the other, and has dragged
open the whole veXed question of marriage.
The Directors are warned by all kinds of re-
mOnstrances, sneers, and menaces, that their
action is cruel and illegal that the free-bOrn
Briton has a right to wife and unlimited
children, and right to starve them too upon
whatever salary, or lack of it, he sees fit
One of the gravest leading journals in the
froth and fury of its vehemence, ironically
advises the "maternal Directors to take in
charge still further the interest of their clerks
and take care that they marry only good
cooks, and women whose tastes run in the
direction of bOmbazine and drab ribbons.
"NO tradesman or factory hand" it tells us,
"wOuld submit for a day to such unparalleled
Tyranny But the clerks of the Union Bank,
being gentlemen and the sons of gentlemen,
belong to that educated middle class which,
we are surprised to learn, I" is always ready, in
England, to basely submit to any yoke for
"the sake of salary" Marriage, it goes on
to say, is mysticaly sacred union, with
which neither Bank Presidents nor Govern
ments have anything to do
Now, all this is very Independent, and worthy
of the freest British Hotspur. But the service
of the Union Bank was certainly not COM
pulsory, and the half-dozen respectable old
gentlemen who have raised all this pOther
concern themselves, it is most likely, very
little with either mystically sacred bonds or
Malthusian schemes. Their object is, most
probably, the business of their Bank, and to
provide themselves with the most efficient
wOrkmen to transact it. II experience has
taught them that the unmarried clerk is less
likely to be tempted by the pleasures open to
young men to neglect his work and defraud
his employers than one with a wife, the sus-
picion of blame falls, it appears to us, more
upon the extravagant wife than the Directors
This point would be stronger, we acknowledge,
if the salary were trihe higher. But, in
Now iOIh III ltdSt, III NOulu Ho SiSdt
extravaganza in an educated young couple
with the two expensive drawbacks of tastes and
babies, to live fully up to an income of $3.50
year; and common prudence would suggest
to "the gentleman or son OF gentleman"
that he should wait until he was competent to
earn that sum, or else content himself with a
wife not ashamed to cook, and dress in
bombazine and no ribbons at all Mystically
sacred bonds will not, as the Directors
doubtless know, pay either butchers or
tailOrs' bills.
In New-York, however, the trouble lies in
the other direction. The clerk who would UNI
dertake to support wife with the tastes
which middle-class people boast here upon
such salary, would be regarded as insulting
the common sense of the woman to whom he
offered il. A fashionable marriage demands
wedding trousseau aud general outset of ex-
penditure which rises before the meagcr yearly