But even if we eventually get reasonable legislation, which would offer rewards instead of additional burdens to those who do their share in keeping up the birth-rate; even if a bachelor over twenty-five became as rare an object in these islands as an old maid in a Mohammedan country, still there would be this enormous superfluity of spinsters. Why is it? Why should Great Britain be regarded as a paradise of old maids? Why should we have more spinsters than other countries? Is it because our colonies swallow up so many men? Then why can’t they swallow up an equal number of women? I should like this most important matter to be taken up by the State and an Institution for Encouraging Marriage 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.