Did you ever see Meitzen’s diagram showing the relation between the price of rye and the number of marriages in Prussia during a period of twenty-five years?
Cheap rye, easy living conditions—number of marriages rises. Dear rye, hard living conditions—number 19 of marriages drops. The fluctuations are strictly proportional. In the twenty-sixth year, given the price of rye, you could predict very closely the number of marriages.
It’s like suicides. It’s the easiest thing in the world to predict the number of men and women who will next year “decide” to take their own lives.
The marriage rate responds not only to the economic conditions of a whole country but to the economic conditions of its various parts.
You live in Vermont. Very well. Between the ages of twenty-five and thirty in Vermont, there will be 279 out of every 1,000 of you who will still be single.
But you live in the State of New York. Very well. Between the ages of twenty-five and thirty there will be 430 of you out of every 1,000 who will still be single.
In Vermont, 279. In New York, 430. A difference of 151 in every 1,000.
For those 151 persons, is it human volition? Is it a perverse aversion to the other sex?
Even at that, on the face of it, those who try to argue New Yorkers into marrying young are 20 clearly taking the difficult route to their purpose. It would be more adroit simply to urge them to live in Vermont.
But isn’t the real reason this—that New York, with its large cities, is farther removed than Vermont, with no large cities, from the primitive industrial conditions of colonial times?