It is probable that the economic tendencies of the day are in the direction of increasing this disparity, since more is demanded of the man in the material sense, and he therefore must delay. Some authorities consider that seniority of six or eight years on the part of the husband constitutes the desirable average. But there are considerations commonly ignored that should qualify this opinion in my judgment. It is not that science has any information regarding the consequence upon the sex or quality of offspring of any one age ratio in marriage rather than another. On subjects like this wild statements are incessantly being made, and we are often told that certain consequences in offspring follow when the husband is older than the wife, and others when he is younger, and so forth. As to this, nothing is known, and it is improbable that there is anything to know. But it has usually been forgotten, so far as I am aware, that the disparity of age has a very marked and real consequence, which is, in its turn, the cause of many more consequences. We have seen that the male death-rate is higher than the female death-rate. At all ages, whether before birth or after it, the male expectation of life is less than the female. This is more conspicuously true than ever now that the work of Lord Lister, based upon that of Pasteur, has so enormously lowered the mortality in childbirth. Even now that mortality is falling, and will rapidly fall for some time to come, still further increasing the female advantage in expectation of life; the more especially this applies to married women. If now, this being the natural fact, we have most husbands older than their wives, it follows that in a great preponderance of cases the husband will die first; and so we have produced the phenomenon of widowhood. The greater the seniority of the husband, the more widowhood will there be in a society. Every economic tendency, every demand for a higher standard of life, every aggravation for the struggle for existence, every increment of the burden of the defective-minded, tending to increase the man's age at marriage, which, on the whole, involves also increasing his seniority--contributes to the amount of widowhood in a nation.