By the invention of power-driven machines and by the distribution of the compact industries of the home through the scattered, innumerable business enterprises of the community, Science has given us, in place of a simple and near world, a complicated and distant one. It takes us longer to learn it.
Simultaneously, by research and also by the use of the printing-press, the locomotive, and the telegraph wire (which speed up the production as well as the dissemination of knowledge), Science has brought forth, in every field of human interest and of human value, a mass of facts and of principles so enormous and so important that the labors of our predecessors on this planet overwhelm us, and we grow to our full physical development long before we have caught up, in any degree, with the previous experience of the race. And till we have done that, to some degree, we are not mature.
With this postponement of personal maturity, there is an even greater postponement of what might be called "technical" maturity. The real mastery of a real technique takes longer and longer. The teacher must not only go to college but must do graduate work. The young doctor, after he finishes college and medical school, is found as an interne in hospitals, as an assistant to specialists, as a traveler through European lecture-rooms. The young engineer, the young architect, the young specialist of every sort, finds his period of preparation steadily extending before him.
What is left undone by Science in keeping us immature is finally accomplished by System.
The world is getting organized. Except in some of the professions (and often even in them) we most of us start in on our life work at some small subdivided job in a large organization of people. The work of the organization is so systematized as to concentrate responsibility and remuneration toward the top. In time, from job to job, up an ascent which grows longer as the organization grows bigger, we achieve responsibility. Till we do, we discharge minor duties for minimum pay.
This is just as true of the boy from a "middle class" family as it is of the boy from a "working class" family. There follows, however, a most important difference between them. The "middle class" boy will have to work longer and go farther than the "working class" boy in order to rise to the financial standards of his class. In this respect the "working class" boy will be a man, ready for marriage, long before his "middle class" fellow-worker.
It is among "middle class" boys, then, that the period of infancy is most prolonged. They get a good deal of schooling. The stores of human knowledge are put in their hands, to some extent, and, to some extent, they catch up with the experience of the race. This takes a longer and longer effort, particularly if real mastery of any real technique is attempted. Then, on going to work, they find that System, supplementing Science, has perfected such an organization of the world of work that they must stay for quite a while in the ranks of the organization. They will not soon be earning what is regarded among their friends as a marrying income. In money, as well as in mind, they approach marriage with increasing tardiness. Their prolonged infancy is financial, as well as mental.
They say that college girls marry late. It is true enough. But it isn't properly stated.
The girls in the kind of family which college girls come from marry late.
It can be definitively established by statistics here considerately omitted that the age of marriage of college girls is no later than the age of marriage of their non-college sisters and acquaintances.