on the skin of her foot; and five and twenty years hence it may be safely predicted that such a girl will not only think it advisable to wear her shoes on her feet, but will discover that they really hurt less there, when one is used to them, than the stones upon the road. At the same time, we must admit that the shoemakers of mankind-and of womankind, too, we presume-have left nothing undone to perpetuate a prejudice against their own particular production and to weaken the force of the love of money for the sake of obtaining it. There is, again, in the inventory of modern wealth, and among the civilized uses of money, another article of dress of so obvious and simple a character that many persons may naturally suppose that it descends from the most remote antiquity. Yet, some centuries ago, all the wardrobes in England did not comprise a single night-dress for lady or gentleman, king or queen. Take again, another institution of the modern dressing-room-the bath. There is a history of civilization in the Tale of a Tub. There is a letter to the old Spectator, on the effects of the love of money, in which the writer says that it is to that we owe the politician, the merchant, and the lawyer; 'Nay,' he adds, 'I believe to that also we are indebted for our Spectator.' We are not prepared to explain the various motives which inspire the pens of authors. Did Shakspeare write for money? Did Pope? Did Dr. Johnson? Did Lord Macaulay? Does Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton? We are concerned at present with the motives of consumers rather than producers; and one thing at least is clear, that it is highly to the credit of the former to elicit such productions from the latter, and that the love of money in the modern world is to a great extent the love of good, elevating, and instructive objects-a love which meets with its return. New desires for health, decency, knowledge, refinement, and intellectual pleasures, have, in fact, revolutionised production. The antithesis to modern wealth is not so much poverty as a different kind of wealth. The change is more remarkable in the quality than in the quantity. No inconsiderable part of human wealth, it is true, still consists of the means of unhappiness rather than of happiness, and of the gratification of vice rather than of virtue. On the whole,

6

however, there is a transformation in the moral character of wealth, and of the desires involved in the general love of money. For the most part, instead of representing wickedness, brutal delight, and idle pomp, or conquest, tyranny, and plunder, the wealth of Europe represents peace, culture, liberty, and the comfort of the many rather than the magnificence of the few. Where man's treasure is, there his heart is also; and the treasures of modern civilization seem to us to show as remarkable an improvement in the moral as in the intellectual and physical condition of society. Riches,' said Milton, grow in hell;' for even in his time much of the wealth that grew on earth bore many marks of being the property of bad and unhappy beings. But we may venture now to ask those well-meaning persons who, without regard to time and place, and without discrimination between good and evil, repeat ancient warnings against the love of money and the pursuit of wealth, whether they mean to praise dirt under the name of poverty, and whether they think idleness better than industry, ignorance better than science and art, and barbarism better than civilized progress? To political economists, on the other hand, we venture to suggest the cultivation of a department of the philosophy of riches which has never been scientifically investigated. The laws which regulate the value of the supply forthcoming from producers have been almost exhaustively developed in political economy; but the deeper laws which regulate the demand of the consumers, and which give the love of money all its force and all its meaning, have never yet received the regular attention of any school of philosophers.

II.

THE CELIBACY OF THE NATION.*

WHAT are the causes of Celibacy? Is it the inevitable lot of millions of persons in this country? It was found in 1851 that three in seven of all the women in Great Britain, of the age of twenty and upwards, were without husbands; and of every hundred women between twenty and forty years of age, forty were set down in the Population Tables of that year as 'spinsters." The Census Commissioners of 1851 predicted that a definite and very large percentage of the population then living would never marry, and there is every reason to believe that their prediction was only under the mark. The tables of the Census. of 1861 may probably show that a larger proportion of a larger population than at the end of the previous ten years remained unmarried, and that there are not only many more 'spinsters now than there were ten years ago, but that there are more in comparison with the total number of women; so that celibacy is increasing in rate as well as in amount. Is this the fault of the men, or, as we ought to say, of the unmarried men of our time? According to a late eminent writer, men have no choice at all about the matter. He reasoned from statistics that the number of marriages is determined not by the temper and wishes of individuals, but by facts over which individuals can exercise no authority.'t They have,' he said, 'a fixed and definite relation to the price of corn;' and in England the experience of a century has proved that, instead of having any

* This Essay was published in February 1863, in the same periodical as the one preceding.

+ Buckle's History of Civilization.

connection with personal feelings, they are simply regulated by the average earnings of the great mass of the people.' The statistics of the year which has just closed seem to afford a sad confirmation of the premises of this argument, if not of its conclusion; for the Registrar General's returns show that the number of marriages in Lancashire declined with the rate of wages. Yet we should say that the natural inference from such facts is the reverse of that which Mr. Buckle drew. If the annual number of marriages were, contrary to what happens, wholly unaffected by variations in the circumstances of individuals, it might then be legitimately inferred that their conduct in the matter is governed by some influence which they have no power to resist. But the fact, on the one hand, that men for the most part marry when they think they can afford it, goes to show that 'personal feelings' have something to do with the result; and, on the other hand, the fact that there are fewer marriages when there are fewer men able to support a wife and family, goes to prove that the attractions to marriage, powerful as they are, are not altogether irresistible, and that celibacy is, at least in a great number of cases, the result of an exercise of individual discretion. We cannot, therefore, acquit our unmarried men of all responsibility, whether they are free from blame in the matter or not. The circumstances of the case cannot, however, be summed up in either of Mr. Buckle's two short and easy formulas. Marriages have not, in point of fact, a constant relation to the price of corn, or to any fixed standard of wages or income. It is needless to say that the amount of the baker's bill is about the last thing a man in the upper or middle classes would think of as an obstacle to his marriage. But even the marriages of the labouring classes are not found to vary uniformly, either with the size of the loaf or with the amount of their earnings. Malthus himself, the chief exponent of the relation between food, wages, marriages, and population, has remarked that from 1720 to 1750 'the price of the loaf had so fallen, while wages had risen, that instead of two-thirds, the labourer could purchase the whole of a peck of wheat with a day's labour.' But this greatly increased command of bread did not, he adds, produce a proportionate increase

of marriages and population; instead of which, to a considerable extent, an improvement took place in the houses and dress of the lower classes, and the quality of their food. Mr. Buckle's measures seem not to fit either of the two extremes of social progress. Savages don't consider whether they are likely to be able to support a family before they undertake to rear one; and men accustomed to some of the habits and comforts of civilization have generally a higher standard for the requisites of married life than a certain quantity of corn, or bare subsistence of any sort. And as there is, on the whole, a steady increase in the wages of labour in Great Britain, there is reason to expect that the whole community will, at no very distant period, be placed above the necessity of watching the price of flour for the signal to marry. But are we to conclude that, as civilization and general prosperity advance, and as the mass of men become emancipated from the control of such restraints upon marriage as we have been talking of, celibacy will become rarer, until it finally disappears from the notice of the statistician? On the contrary, the conclusion to which the evidence points is, that celibacy without vows or compulsion is a form of human existence which is commonly to be seen only in civilized society, and which becomes commoner as civilization goes forward and spreads.

Some writers, struck by the increasing number of unmarried women, have asked 'Why are women redundant ?' The question seems to us to partake of the nature of the 'fallacy of interrogation,' which Archbishop Whately illustrates by the instance of the witness who was asked whether he had left off beating his father?' At least, if the real gist of the inquiry is simply why are so many women unmarried, the assumption of their 'redundancy' in the same proportion is mere rhetoric and sophistry, not to say impertinence. But why are so many women unmarried? The stubbornness or eccentricity of a few men, the perversity or unloveliness of a very few women, may be disregarded altogether, as producing no perceptible effect upon the Census, or the Registrar General's returns. A certain untowardness in the local and social distribution of individuals is perhaps a cause of celibacy of more importance. A and B,