Mr.
Messinger puts with such plaintive appeal to the parents of this
generation: "Shall our daughters have dowries?" But in the very
commencement of his argument he abandons the case he has voluntarily
taken up, and enters a plea, not for the daughters, but for the young
men who may wish to marry the daughters. Also in urging upon parents
the duty of endowing their daughters he seems to have lost sight of
the fact that "dowry," in its very spirit and intention, does not
propose to care for the husband, but is solely in the interest of the
wife.

He asserts, doubtless with accuracy, that the average income of young
men is $1,100 a year, and he finds in this fact a sufficient reason
for the decrease of marriage among them. It is no reason at all; for a
large and sensible proportion of young men do marry and live happily
and respectably on $1,100 a year, and those who cannot do so are very
clearly portrayed by Mr. Messinger, and very little respected by any
sensible young woman.

But it is not to be believed that they form any preponderating or
influential part of that army of young men who are the to-morrow of
our great republic. Let any reader count, from such young men as are
known to him, the number who would divide their $1,100 as Mr.
Messinger supposes them to do:--

Dress for self and wife $600
Apartments 400
Amusements 100

I venture to say the proportion would be very small indeed.

For the majority of young men know that nothing worth having is
lost in the sharing. They meet in their own circle some modest,
home-making girl whom they love so truly that they can tell her
exactly what their income is, and then they find out that their own
ideas of economy were crude and extravagant compared with the
wondrous ways and means which reveal themselves to a loving woman's
comprehension of the subject. The Oranges, Rutherford, and every
suburb of New York are full of pretty little homes supported
without worry, and with infinite happiness, upon $1,100 a year,
and perhaps, indeed, upon less money.

The difficulty with the class of young men whose case Mr. Messinger
pleads is one deserving of no sympathy. It is a difficulty evoked by
vanity and self-conceit, of which Fashion and Mrs. Grundy are the
bugbears. Why should a young man capable of making only $1,100 a year
expect to marry a girl whose parents are rich enough to guard her
"from every wind of heaven, lest i