The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-01-23
pESsIMISTIC ENGLrsHMEN.

"Homeiess Engiand'-Not Enoagi
 Marrying-"The Average Man" De.
 fcnded-The Married Woman's Day. London, Jan, l5.
 To the Editor of the Journal and Courier
 To judge by what the English are
 saying of themselves, affairs generally
 In this country are in dreadfully bad
 way. high dignitary of the church
 has suggested day of national hu-
 initiation, but this isn't necessary. The
 people are humble enough already.
 Their proverbial -complacency
 seems to have been routed for the time
 being by q spirit of the blackest uessi-
 mism. Nothing is quite right. They
 still bank on the valor of their troops,
 and with good reason, but their army
 as whole they've lost faith in, and
 they are not so sure as they used to be
 that they have an impregnable defence
 even in the navy. What looks big on
 paper may not be so formidable when
 put to the test on water Commercial
 ly things are going from bad to worse.
 The British workman and the British
 merchant are alike under the ban
 Under the ban, that is, of British con-
 demnation, for this gloomy picture is
 not a picture of England as others see
 her, but of England as she sees herself
 From the range of these blue goggles of
 self deprecation nothing is excluded,
 not even the domestic hearth or the
 matrimonial market. The dyspeptic
 British woodsman might at least have spared his own roof tree. But he is in
 no mood to spare anything, and so of
 late, various newspapers have made
 themselves vehicles for the expression
 of popular discontent with home life, and for the ventilation of such ques-
 tions as, why domesticity IS decaying,
 why there are now more bachelors and more self-elected spinsters than for nerly, and why the hirth-rate is so rapidly tumbling.
 When people are on the stool of re-
 pentance they are likely to exaggerate their own shortcomings. This country is perhaps not so badly off in these matters as she thinks she is In one paper recently there was an article headed Homeless England In this the broad statement was made that no one, man or woman, wants to have home nowadays. People who could command every domestic comfort pre- fer to live in hotels or to eat at restau rants. If the men shirk domesticity so equally do the women, and we are rap idly developing into a homeless nation. This is from "The Lady" an eminent ly respectable journal which makes speciality of matters appertaining to SO cial life. But it is an exaggeration whoever said it. Far more just the observation of one who signs herself "A Common Sense Girl" Domesticity, she maintains, is not decaying in coun- try places. but, she adds. 'in that great wicked city, where society encourages marriage without love, where theaters and places of amusement abound, the 1 majority of people get such a thirst for | pleasure that they entirely blot out of 1 their lives all that is pure and noble l tween the metropolis and the country | at large, is sensible. The boast across the channel is that Paris is France, but l 1t happily cannot yet be said that Lon- | don is England nor that outside of this seething center of pleasure and gilded sin there is the same decline in what | is vital to home life.
 In a prize essay on why bachelorhood | $ so much more common than formerly, The author lodges much of the blame at the door of young womanhood The business mans office work is now done by female labor, which, he says, is dis .ourag ging to matrimony in two ways. The young lady no longer jumps at the first offer, but, secure in her billet, feels hat she can afford to wait. At the same time, he says, her offers are not likely to come so thick and fast as of yore, because, by doing, at much .heaper rate, work for which cores oondence clerks of the male gender 1sed to be paid from ten to fifteen dol ars week. she necessarily reduces to financial hopelessness those who might otherwise have been her suitors. The writer of this prize winning essay loesnt believe that amongst people nigh up in the social scale marriages ire any less frequent than ever, nor Ioes he think the marriage rate shows my decline amongst the lower working lasses and the farm laborers. The hange. he says, is in the middle class s. who feel so keenly the squeeze of commercial competition and so many of whom have to get along on salary inadequate to their style f life. The limited supply of candidates for is in part attributed by this ssayist to the growth of the limited ompany system, with it's inevitable of small businesses. Twen- y years ago Smith Brown, Jones and .obinson, he says, each ran a small usiness, bringing them in modest . of two hundred and fifty , ounds year a-piece. To-day the four ( businesses belong to one company, with , he result that while Smith is drawing f ve hundred pounds a year as mana : ing director, Brown. Jones and Robin I on are merely salaried branch mana I CTS at one hundred pounds year. the f smaining two hundred pounds going T ) the shareholders in dividends. For | nat sluggishness of the matrimonial larket which is due to beggarly wages f e especially planes the government, 2 hich, he says must of necessity be N oked to to set the pace, and which, in IT very Englishman might well be V shamed of it. In the army it has long h ,ased to excite comment that the av- T