rriage started under
State auspices. One of the duties of this institution would be to induce
numbers of suitable women to emigrate, so as to preserve the proper
balance of the sexes in the home country, and that every colonist might
have a chance to get a wife. I heard the other day of a very ordinary
colonial girl who had eleven men all wanting to marry her at once.
Eleven men! And yet there are scores of charming English girls who grow
old and soured without having had a single offer of marriage.

Another duty of the Institution for Encouraging Marriage would be to try
and reach and bring together the thousands of lonely middle-class men
and women in large towns, who are engaged at work all day and have no
means of meeting members of the opposite sex. I have just been reading
Francis Gribble's very interesting novel, _The Pillar of Cloud_, in
which he describes the existence of half a dozen girls in 'Stonor House'
one of those dreary barracks for homeless females engaged during the
day. The frantic desire of these girls to meet men of their own class is
painfully true, and this desire is not so much the outcome of young
women's natural tendency to cultivate young men, but because all such
men to them are possible husbands, and marriage is the only way out from
Stonor House and the joyless existence there.

In _The Pathway of the Pioneer_ published a few years ago, Dolf Wyllarde
breaks similar ground, but her young women are more morbid and less
frankly anxious to meet men with a view to matrimony. Both books,
however, give one a good idea of the cheerless, unnatural lives led by
young middle-class women, whose relatives, if any, are far away, and who
work for their living in large towns--condemned almost inevitably to
celibacy by these unfavourable social conditions.

That large numbers of daintily-bred women should be condemned to such an
existence is the strongest possible argument in favour of the
establishment of two French institutions, viz., strictly limited
families and the system of _dots_. Of late years, the former has been
largely adopted in England, and until the latter custom also becomes the
rule, the Institution for Encouraging Matrimony could take the matter in
hand. Two or three unusually sensible philanthropists have already given
their attention to this important subject, but any movement of this
nature at once assumes too much the aspect of a matrimonial agency to be
approved by the class for who