May we observe that they were not taken in marriage out of a conscious sense of duty to the Commonwealth and to Population? They were taken because they were needed. The colonial gentleman had to have his soap-kettles and candle-molds and looms and smokehouses and salting-tubs and spinning-wheels and other industrial machines operated for him by somebody, if he was going to get his food and clothes and other necessaries cheap. He lost money if he wasn't domestic. He was domestic.
Our young engineering friend, John, when HE looked forward to HIS future domestic establishment, saw no industrial machines in it at all except a needle and a saucepan. Consequently he had very little real use for a wife. What he wanted was money enough to "give" Mary a home.
Marriages are more uncertain now. And fewer of them are marriages of mere convenience. It is both a worse and a better state of things. On the one hand, John didn't marry Mary so soon. On the other hand, he was prevented from wanting anything in his marriage except just Mary.
The enormous utility of the colonial wife, issuing in enormous toil (complicated by unlimited childbearing), had this kind of result:
Among the wives of the 418 Yale husbands of the period from 1701 to 1745, there were
Thirty-three who died before they were twenty-five years old;
Fifty-five who died before they were thirty-five years old;
Fifty-nine who died before they were forty-five years old.
Those 418 Yale husbands lost 147 wives before full middle age. It ceases, therefore, to be surprising, though it remains unabatedly sickening, that the stories of the careers of colonial college men, of the best-bred men of the times, are filled with such details as:
"——First wife died at twenty-four, leaving six children."