“Unjustifiable deception?” Have I pretended to excuse it? But I look back of the timid woman—the pauper, bedecked in silks, laces and gems,—for most men like to see their wives dressed as well as their neighbors—the moral coward, who has lied from the natural desire to handle a little money for herself without being cross-examined about it—and ask—“by what stress of humiliating tyranny was she brought to this?”
All women do not manage monetary affairs well, you remind me, gently. Some are unprincipled in their extravagance, reckless of everything save their own whims and unconscionable desires. Must a man beggar himself and those dependent upon him, lest such an one should accuse him of parsimony? By yielding to demands he knows to be exorbitant, he proves himself to be weaker even than she.
I have said nowhere that a woman is the best judge of what her husband ought to appropriate from his gains or fortune for the support of his family. But he stands convicted of a grave error of judgment, if he has chosen from the whole world as the keeper of his honor and happiness, a woman whom he cannot trust to touch his purse-strings.
Let us be patient as well as reasonable. So long as a babe is kept in long clothes, and carried in arms, it will not learn to walk alone. The majority of women have been swathed in conventionalities and borne above the practicalities of business by mistaken tenderness or misapprehension of their powers, for so long, that, however quick may be their intuitions, time and practice are necessary to make them adepts in financiering. The best way to render them trustworthy is not by taking it for granted, and letting them see that you do, that they have sinister designs upon your pockets. They are not pirates by nature, nor are they, even with such schooling as many get from their legal proprietors, always on the alert to wheedle or extort a few dollars for their own sty and selfish ends. After all, is there not a spice of truth in the would-be satire of the old distich?
“What are wives made of—made of?
Everything good, if they’re but understood!”
If you chance to be painfully conscious of the mental inferiority and warped conscience of your partner in the solemn dance of life; if there is more “worse” than “better” in the everyday wear of the matrimonial bond; if sloth and waste mark her administration of household affairs, instead of the industrious thrift you would recommend, and which you see others practise; if the rent in the bottom of the pouch carries off the money faster than you can drop it in, you are to be pitied almost as much as your bachelor neighbor, who sews on his own buttons, and depends upon boarding-houses for his daily food. Still, my friend, is there any reason why you should accept the consequences of this one mistake on your part, with less philosophy; bring to the bearing of it a smaller modicum of Christian resignation than you summon to support you under any other? Women have been as grievously misled by fancy or affection, before now, and have borne the burden of disappointment to the grave without murmur or reproach.
Then, there is always the chance that your wife is not “understood,” or that, well-meant as your attempts to “manage” her have been, you have not selected the most judicious methods of doing this. In this enlightened and liberal age, nobody, unless he be bigot or fool, habitually thinks and speaks of women as a lower order of intelligent beings. But even in your breast, my ill-mated friend, there may lurk a touch of the ancient leaven of uncharitableness, and in your treatment of her “whom the Lord hath given to be with you,” there may be a spice of arrogance, the exponent of which, were you Turk or Kaffir, would be brute force.
“I do not object to your proposal, my love. You always have your own way in household affairs,” said a very “kind and affectionate” man to his wife, with the air of a potentate amiably relinquishing his sceptre for love’s sake.