South Coast town, discovered on holiday in London recently, said that there was a positive slump in marriages in his town. He did not think it was due so much to a disinclination to wed, as to the fact that most of the girls of marriageable age had been "appropriated" during the war. Many of them had married colonials, A search among the Registrar-General's files shows that the mean age of marriage in Britain has been gradually on the increase since 1896. So far as males are concerned, the increase has been considerably accelerated since 1914, this notwithstanding the fact that the proportionate numbers of boys who married under 19 was trebled during the war.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.