There is

She gives her

marry. I beg your pardon, all rich women do not marry. Miss C. She is not married, but no one laughs at her. guests excellent champagne, there are charming young ladies there to flirt with, all is gay. No one feels any compassion for the hostess, and there is no need to feel any.

The world pays homage to Miss C. It respects her as it should respect her for her noble character, her sweet amiability, and her excellent dinners. No one ever thinks her unfortunate, even though no gentleman sits ex officio at the bottom of her table.

Look at Lady Gwendolen Blueblood; she is the friend of one of the Princesses, she is a relation of a Prime Minister, but she has never married. If she had married that young ensign Moneyless, who made a passionate declaration to her years back, she would have lost her position and gone down in the opinion of the world. Unmarried actresses and vocalists are not old maids either; nor those brave pioneers of civilisation, few in number until now, who, though they are women, occupy an independent and honourable position. Such women, for instance, as the lady doctors in America. Who would call Florence Nightingale an" old maid ?”

As soon as a woman is indebted to herself for the respect in which she is held, and the position she fills, there is an end to the cry for a husband.

There are, too, no old maids among the people. The banker, whose rotund form retains its rotundity thanks to the excellent offices of a forty year old cook, is utterly indifferent whether the said cook is married or single. I value my dressmaker according to her skill in cutting out, and care not if she own a husband or lacks one, and my feelings for my laundress are unaffected by her title. She may be either Miss Smith or Mrs. Smith for aught that I care. Women of the working classes are, in fact, estimated according to the excellence of their work, and those of them who are husbandless are not on that account supposed to be inefficient.

The real old maid exists, as we see, only among the less wealthy members of the middle and higher classes of society.

Men do not know how hard the life of an old maid is, for no man ever gives an old maid the opportunity of telling him the secrets and sorrows of her days. But I have been the confidante of many an old maid.

The life of an old maid is a tragedy, a tragedy all the more tragic from the fact that it lacks these accessories which stage tragedies have: youth, beauty, and sensation. Society, which should protect the poor and the weak, condemns the old maid to this hard fate; nay, it not only condemns her, it laughs at her trouble. She has to bear her trouble as best she may. Such comfort as that which is granted to the educated is not hers, for she is ignorant. There are thoughts, great and glowing with flame, which are written in books, and which beat in the souls of living men; to think such thoughts makes the poorest life resplendent and glorious, even as the morning sun rising or setting changes the bleakest landscape into something rich and strange. But the old maid can never know such thoughts as these; her mind is untutored, she cannot grasp them; her soul is no temple of recollections, no storehouse of memories; she has seen little, and knows still less.

Woe to her then!

And what if her mind be active and restless? People will drone into her ears that she is to be patient and resigned. She has a passionate desire to do active good, but no field on which she can display her activity; her heart is full of tenderness, and that tenderness can never find an outlet. Her life is little other than a long martyrdom. For what could be more agonising than this sharp contrast-eager yearning to do, and continual restraint from performance? The poor woman knows that she has a mine of happiness in herself, but it is a mine she may never use. She must dispense with the gold it contains, and live instead on the alms that are doled out to her. In her martyrdom, neither faith nor science will be glorified; it is a martyrdom which is fruitless, and at which the passers by will only jeer.

Men are afraid of old maids, they dare not befriend her lest she should think they meant to marry her. Her parents, if she has any,

have a secret grudge against the child who has disappointed their

hopes.

This is all very well, says an objector, but old maids are usually by no means amiable characters. How can one respect her, or pity her? But is it easy for her to be amiable? Is the consciousness that wrong has long been done her likely to develop her amiability? If she does wrong, how much is not owing to the fact that she suffers bitter injury? It is not wonderful that she feels hatred towards mankind, for mankind has treated her with continual contempt. There are natures too noble and too much permeated with goodness to feel even such bitterness as this; endowed with intelligence, they know well how much they are wronged, but they bear no individual person ill for the injury which the world, as a whole, is inflicting on them. But the consciousness that the wrong they suffer is the wrong that makes the lots of thousands hard to bear will make them at last the apostles of a new creed.

It was no fault of the girl that she remained unmarried. It was probably not the fault of nature, who unfits but few for the marriage state. The women who remain unmarried are often not by any means ugly women. They are women of more refined and delicate natures, women who refuse to use base weapons in the fray for husbands; women who refuse to enter with other women into the contest.

The unmarried class is formed of those women who will not, from prudential considerations, marry any man who makes them an offer, women to whom it is not indifferent if a man's reputation is that of a Don Juan, his appearance of a Caliban, and his figure of a Falstaff; women in short who cannot and will not accept as an axiom that "any husband is better than no husband."

"Marry," says society to a young woman, "6 marry, you must marry." ""Certainly," says the young woman, "but what am I to do to get married?" "Nothing" is the answer; "don't show any greater liking for any marriageable young man than you show for any of your female acquaintances for whom you care not two straws. Set all your endeavours on making your semi-existence a whole existence by the addition of a male half, but let everyone think the while that your

whole ambition is to stop at home always with papa and mamma. Chance and your good star may find you a husband; marriages are made in heaven."

Surprising, is it not? We, living in a century of reason and justice, make a considerable part of society dependent on fate and on destiny which they cannot rough-hew for themselves. You have no husband; the gods have condemned you to spinsterhood; away with you, useless chattel that you are, the world needs you not, live as best you can on the alms of society. Remark the strange illogicalness of the situation. Women are told it is their duty to marry. But it is a duty the performance of which depends on the inclination of another. For years past people have only laughed pitifully or scoffingly at old maids. In the loud din of a busy world their hushed lamentation has been little heard. But the cry of their sorrow grows louder and louder; it demands a hearing of society. We are in the desert still; but onward the dawn grows clear before our yearning eyes; we see afar the promised land; the land of uncontrolled, unrestricted WORK. And when that promised land is attained, the old maid, the creature of contempt and compassion, will cease to exist.

L. M.

ENGLISH WIVES-PRESENT AND FUTURE.

BY CHRISTINE L. SNOW.

B

N an article which pourtrays in bold outline, and finishes to the minutest point of detail, many of the chief features of the

movement for female emancipation, it is nevertheless remarkable that but scant space, and (apparently) curt thought should be bestowed upon a certain aspect of the question which is, however, admitted to have furnished the first impulse towards the work. "The wrongs of married women," are, in truth, merely glanced at in Mrs. A. Sutherland Orr's paper on "The Future of English Women" (vide the Nineteenth Century, June, 1878), albeit such wrongs avowedly lie at the root of much of the action of the "Woman's Rights" party.

Believing that a wider study of such wrongs, a more perfect insight into the dangers which the present law makes possible, and which certain social conditions are daily making more and more probable, will be for the advantage of many English women who are wives "or likely to become so," I purpose to take for my subject the actual condition of English wives, and to enter upon some reflections as to the future results of existing marriage laws, and of prevailing custom with reference to the marriage tie. I shall endeavour to show that the inconsistencies and anomalies in the laws which regulate the relation of marriage, are so many, and so great, that no man or woman who looks the subject honestly in the face can fail to see that a change of some kind is imperative. It is indeed a matter for thoughtful inquiry, whether any other class of wrongs, any other scandal so palpable and