men’s pay.  What reason is there to suppose that they will relapse into a state of superfluous energy after the war?  The war has merely brought about, with the rapidity of a landslide, a state of affairs for which the world was ripe.  The world after the war will have to adjust itself to this extension of women’s employment, and to this increase in the proportion of self-respecting, self-supporting women.

Contributing very largely to the establishment of this greatly enlarged class of independent women will be the great shortage for the next decade of marriageable men, due to the killing and disablement of the war.  The women of the next decades will not only be able to get along economically without marriage, but they will find it much more difficult to marry.  It will also probably be a period in which a rise in prices may, as it usually does, precede the compensating rise in wages.  It may be that for some years it will be more difficult to maintain a family.  This will be a third factor in the fixation of this class of bachelor women.

Various writers, brooding over the coming shortage of men, have jumped to the conclusion that polygamy is among the probabilities of the near future.  They write in terms of real or affected alarm for which there is no justification; they wallow in visions of Germany “legalising” polygamy, and see Berlin seeking recuperation, in man power by converting herself into another Salt Lake City.  But I do not think that Germany, in the face of the economic ring that the Allies will certainly draw about her, is likely to desire a very great increase in population for the next few years; I do not see any great possibility of a specially rich class capable of maintaining numerous wives being sustained by the impoverished and indebted world of Europe, nor the sources from which a supply of women preferring to become constituents in a polygamous constellation rather than self-supporting freewomen is to be derived.

The temperamental dislike of intelligent women to polygamy is at least as strong as a man’s objection to polyandry.  Polygamy, open or hidden, flourishes widely only where there are women to be bought.  Moreover, there are considerable obstacles in religion and custom to be overcome by the innovating polygamist—­even in Germany.  It might mean a breach of the present good relations between Germany and the Vatican.  The relative inferiority of the tradition of the German to that of most other European women, its relative disposition towards feminine servitude, is no doubt a consideration on the other scale of this discussion, but I do not think it is one heavy enough to tilt back the beam.

So far from a great number of men becoming polygamists, I think it would be possible to show cause for supposing that an increasing proportion will cease even to be monogamists.  The romantic excitements of the war have produced a temporary rise in the British marriage rate; but before the war it had been falling slowly and the average age at marriage had been rising, and it is quite possible that this process will be presently resumed and, as a new generation grows up to restore the balance of the sexes, accelerated.