In Darkest England, and the Way Out

by William Booth

SECTION 7.—A MATRIMONIAL BUREAU.

There is another direction in which something ought to be done to restore the natural advantages enjoyed by every rural community which have been destroyed by the increasing tendency of mankind to come together in huge masses. I refer to that which is after all one of the most important elements in every human life, that of marrying and giving in marriage. In the natural life of a country village all the lads and lasses grow up together, they meet together in religious associations, in daily employments, and in their amusements on the village green. They have learned their A, B, C and pothooks together, and when the time comes for pairing off they have had excellent opportunities of knowing the qualities and the defects of those whom they select as their partners in life. Everything in such a community lends itself naturally to the indispensable preliminaries of love-making, and courtships, which, however much they may be laughed at, contribute more than most things to the happiness or life. But in a great city all this is destroyed. In London at the present moment how many hundreds, nay thousands, of young men and young women, who are living in lodgings, are practically without any opportunity of making the acquaintance of each other, or of any one of the other sex! The street is no doubt the city substitute for the village green, and what a substitute it is!

It has been bitterly said by one who knew well what he was talking about, "There are thousands of young men to-day who have no right to call any woman by her Christian name, except the girls they meet plying their dreadful trade in our public thoroughfares." As long as that is the case, vice has an enormous advantage over virtue; such an abnormal social arrangement interdicts morality and places a vast premium upon prostitution. We must get back to nature if we have to cope with this ghastly evil. There ought to be more opportunities afforded for healthy human intercourse between young men and young women, nor can Society rid itself of a great responsibility for all the wrecks of manhood and womanhood with which our streets are strewn, unless it does make some attempt to bridge this hideous chasm which yawns between the two halves of humanity. The older I grow the more absolutely am I opposed to anything that violates the fundamental law of the family. Humanity is composed of two sexes, and woe be to those who attempt to separate them into distinct bodies, making of each half one whole! It has been tried in monasteries and convents with but poor success, yet what our fervent Protestants do not seem to see is that we are reconstructing a similar false system for our young people without the safeguards and the restraints of convent walls or the sanctifying influence of religious conviction. The conditions of City life, the absence of the enforced companionship of the village and small town, the difficulty of young people finding harmless opportunities of friendly intercourse, all tends to create classes of celibates who are not chaste, and whose irregular and lawless indulgence of a universal instinct is one of the most melancholy features of the present state of society. Nay, so generally is this recognised, that one of the terms by which one of the consequences of this unnatural state of things is popularly known is "the social evil," as if all other social evils were comparatively unworthy of notice in comparison to this.

While I have been busily occupied in working out my Scheme for the registration of labour, it has occurred to me more than once, why could not something like the same plan be adopted in relation to men who want wives and women who want husbands? Marriage is with most people largely a matter or opportunity. Many a man and many a woman, who would, if they had come together, have formed a happy household, are leading at this moment miserable and solitary lives, suffering in body and in soul, in consequence of their exclusion from the natural state of matrimony. Of course, the registration of the unmarried who wish to marry would be a matter of much greater delicacy than the registration of the joiners and stone-masons who wish to obtain work. But the thing is not impossible. I have repeatedly found in my experience that many a man and many a woman would only be too glad to have a friendly hint as to where they might prosecute their attentions or from which they might receive proposals. In connection with such an agency, if it were established—for I am mot engaging to undertake this task— I am only throwing out a possible suggestion as to the development in the direction of meeting a much needed want, there might be added training homes for matrimony. My heart bleeds for many a young couple whom I see launching out into the sea of matrimony with no housewifery experience. The young girls who leave our public elementary schools and go out into factories have never been trained to home duties, and yet, when taken to wife, are unreasonably expected to fill worthily the difficult positions of the head of a household and the mother of a family. A month spent before marriage in a training home of housewifery would conduce much more to the happiness of the married life than the honeymoon which immediately follows it.

Especially is this the case with those who marry to go abroad and settle in a distant country. I often marvel when I think of the utter helplessness of the modern woman, compared with the handiness of her grandmother. How many of our girls can even bake a loaf? The baker has killed out one of our fundamental domestic arts. But if you are in the Backwoods or in the Prairie or in the Bush, no baker's cart comes round every morning with the new-made bread, and I have often thought with sorrow of the kind of stuff which this poor wife must serve up to her hungry husband. As it is with baking, so it is with washing, with milking, with spinning, with all the arts and sciences of the household, which were formerly taught, as a matter of course, to all the daughters who were born in the world. Talk about woman's rights, one of the first of woman's rights is to be trained to her trade, to be queen of her household, and mother of her children.

Speaking of colonists leads me to the suggestion whether something could not be done to supply, on a well-organised system, the thousands of bachelor miners or the vast host of unmarried males who are struggling with the wilderness on the outskirts of civilisation, with capable wives from the overplus of marriageable females who abound in our great towns. Woman supplied in adequate quantities is the great moraliser of Society, but woman doled out as she is in the Far West and the Australian bush, in the proportion of one woman to about a dozen men, is a fertile source of vice and crime. Here again we must get back to nature, whose fundamental laws our social arrangements have rudely set on one side with consequences which as usual she does not fail to exact with remorseless severity. There have always been born into the world and continue to be born boys and girls in fairly equal proportions, but with colonising and soldiering our men go away, leaving behind them a continually growing surplus of marriageable but unmarried spinsters, who cannot spin, and who are utterly unable to find themselves husbands. This is a wide field on the discussion of which I must not enter. I merely indicate it as one of those departments in which an intelligent philanthropy might find a great sphere for its endeavours; but it would be better not to touch it at all than to deal with it with light-hearted precipitancy and without due consideration of all the difficulties and dangers connected therewith. Obstacles, however, exist to be overcome and converted into victories. There is even a certain fascination about the difficult and dangerous, which appeals very strongly to all who know that it is the apparently insolvable difficulty which contains within its bosom the key to the problem which you are seeking to solve.