The divorce courts are congested, but there are more entrances io matrimony than exits from it. The Registrar General has just announced a record year of marriages. As Montaigne said, "It happens as with cages. The birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out." Certainly they are getting in more rapidly than they find escape, and whether all is for the best only omniscience can say, suggests the "Manchester It is curious that in a Britain so lately bereft of a million of its young men the marriage-rate should soar rather than recede. But facts defy probabi The economic interpreter of history, the most fashionable guide to sociology in these days, will be hard put to it to find a reason why. Trade drooped with the declining year, incomes fell, and one would have pictured -prospective husbands and wives re. garding the income-tax schedule with a deepening gloom. But the human spirit is invincible, and not even six shillings in the pound can finally affright it. Or was it the droop of prices that announced the happy day to brides to whom a trousseau at remnant prices seemed something beyond expectation's wildest dream?
Is Spite or Everyrutne.
Yet they were faced with an extreme, even a growing, shortage of houses, and willingness to enter on married life under the war conditions of a boarding-house speaks highly for the national courage. And yet they married. A cynic of the baser type might suggest that the rapacity of lodging-house landladies had passed the limits of endurance, and that single men and women were driven to find immediate release. Or, again, the threatened chaos of civilization may have convinced the younger generation that only in partnership could life be faced.
But. perhaps the economic interpreters are here finally discredited, and the psychologist can enter into his own. "That monster custom doth possess the world," and the war had seta mode in youthful marriages. In that case, we have but caught up the dilatoriness of our fathers and mothers, and thus after the recent boom things are likely to. settle down again. We can only hope that there is no truth in the bitter suggestion that the people who marry most swiftly marry most often.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.