Part 47

And I'll niver go home again! Home to the ould lost years, Home where the soft warm rain Drifts loike the drip av tears!

***************************************************************** Vol. XXIII October 1910 No. 4

THE WOMEN OF TO-MORROW {page 486-496 part 3.}

WILLIAM HARD

III LOVE DEFERRED

Mary felt she would wait for John even if, instead of going away on a career, he were going away on a comet.

She waited for him from the time she was twenty-two to the time she was twenty-six, and would have waited longer if she hadn't got angry and insisted on marrying him.

Into why she waited, and why she wouldn't wait any longer, chance put most of the simple plot of the commonplace modern drama, "Love Deferred." It is so commonplace that it is doubtful if any other drama can so stretch the nerves or can so draw from them a thin, high note of fine pain.

We will pretend that John was a doctor. No, that's too professional. He was a civil engineer. That's professional enough and more commercial. It combines Technique and Business, which are the two big elements in the life of Modern Man.

When they got engaged, Mary was through college, but John had one more year to go in engineering school.

How the preparation for life does lengthen itself out!

When Judge Story was professor at Harvard in the thirties of the last century, he put the law into his pupils' heads in eighteen months. The present professors require three years.

In 1870 the Harvard Medical School made you attend classes for four months in each of three years. It now makes you do it for nine months in each of four years.

As for engineering, the University of Wisconsin gave John a chill by informing him in its catalogue that "it is coming to be generally recognized that a four-year technical course following the high-school course is not an adequate preparation for those who are to fill important positions; and the University would urge all those who can afford the time to extend their studies over a period of five or six years."

John compromised on five. This gave him a few Business courses in the College of Commerce in addition to his regular Technique courses in the College of Engineering. He was now a Bachelor of Science.

He thereupon became an apprentice in the shops of one of the two biggest electrical firms in the United States. He inspected the assembling of machines before they were shipped, and he overheard wisdom from foremen and superintendents. His salary was fifteen cents an hour. Since he worked about ten hours a day, his total income was about forty dollars a month. At the end of the year he was raised to fifty. This was the normal raise for a Bachelor of Science.

The graduates of Yale and Harvard in the bright colonial days of those institutions married almost immediately on graduation. John didn't. He didn't get married so early nor become a widower so often. He didn't carry so many children to the christening font nor so many to the cemetery.

Look at the dark as well as the bright side of colonial days.

Pick out any of the early Harvard classes. Honestly and truly at random, run your finger down the column and pick any class. The class of 1671!

It had eleven graduates. One of them remained a bachelor. Don't be too severe on him. He died at twenty-four. Of the remaining ten, four were married twice and two were married three times. For ten husbands, therefore, there were eighteen wives.

Mr. G. Stanley Hall, President of Clark University, very competently remarks: "The problem of superfluous women did not exist in those days. They were all needed to bring up another woman's children."

The ten husbands of the Harvard class of 1671, with their eighteen wives, had seventy-one children. They did replenish the earth. They also filled the churchyards.

TWENTY-ONE OF THOSE SEVENTY-ONE CHILDREN DIED IN CHILDHOOD.

This left fifty to grow up. It was an average of five surviving children for each of the ten fathers. But it was an average of only 2.7 for each of the eighteen mothers.

In commending the colonial family one must make an offset for the unfair frequency with which it had more than one wife-and-mother to help out its fertility record. And in commending the era of young wives and numerous children one must make an offset for the hideous frequency with which it killed them.

Turn from Harvard to Yale. Look at the men who graduated from 1701 to 1745.

The girls they took in marriage were most of them under twenty-one and were many of them down in their 'teens, sometimes as far down as fourteen.

May we observe that they were not taken in marriage out of a conscious sense of duty to the Commonwealth and to Population? They were taken because they were needed. The colonial gentleman had to have his soap-kettles and candle-molds and looms and smokehouses and salting-tubs and spinning-wheels and other industrial machines operated for him by somebody, if he was going to get his food and clothes and other necessaries cheap. He lost money if he wasn't domestic. He was domestic.