Now the merits of the money question in marriage have never been properly arranged. In France the wife has her own _dot_, as a matter of course; but the French have so carefully adjusted their population to their pockets that we can only bow in silent admiration of their unparalleled foresight. In England a girl very often marries without any fortune of her own, on the understanding either that she is beautiful and that the husband is prepared to endow her with all his worldly goods, or that she is so useful that she will really save him a good deal of money. If she is very beautiful, her relations can generally get a settlement made on her; if she is only useful, she is lucky if she can induce her husband to insure his life in her favour. The merely useful wife has very little hold on ready money. One week she may get a good sum of money, another week nothing, for her household expenses. If she is clever and managing, she will probably gain her husband’s confidence, and if he is honest and has a regular income they may be very comfortable together; but under other conditions the affairs of the household go from bad to worse, and the wife is only a very inefficient servant, who may get her keep, but who will certainly not get her wages. I can only suggest that the position of wife and mother ought to legally entitle a woman to a fixed proportion of her husband’s income, and the position of housekeeper to a further proportion. If, as is often the case in upper and middle-class modern marriage, the husband and wife do not live in the connubial state, the legal allowance as wife and mother would not be made, but the allowance as hostess and housekeeper could be enforced as long as they remained under the same roof. In the case of the poorer classes, where the wife does the whole work of keeping up the home and increasing the family, the proportion should be very much greater, so great, indeed, as to make both partners think twice before recklessly bringing children into the world. Among this class I think that the birth of a child might legalise the union of the parents. This appears to be an old custom in many parts of the world.