MISS TAYLOR ON MARRIAGE.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."]
Stn,—While thanking you for the elevated view which you have long and consistently maintained of the position of women in married life, a view which I believe is as much more practical as it is more noble than that lately maintained by the Pall Mall Gazette, may I be permitted to correct a mistake as to my own meaning, into which I do not doubt you were led by inadvertence on my part (perhaps by too great brevity), as I find to my surprise that both you and the writer in the Pall Mall Gazette have fallen into it.
When I specified the motives which induce men to enter into a marriage contract, I was not attempting to point out the motives which are most powerful, still less the motives which are most powerful with civilized men of our own time and country, but only those which are peculiar to men. You judge rightly that I never meant to ignore the force of higher motives ; I only did not mention them because I believe them to act no less strongly on women than on men, and the drift of my argument was that men, like women, have special inducements of their own to marriage over and above those which are common to both sexes.
Replying as briefly as possible to a writer who warned women for their own interests against any changes in the existing law of marriage, lest men may become less desirous of entering into and maintaining a morally and legally binding contract of marriage, I tacitly admitted that women have reasons of their own for desiring such a contract., and 1 put aside motives common to both, pointing out only that there are also reasons peculiar to men ; the moral I intended to draw from this argument being that, as the balance between men and women is pretty equal, there is no need for women to throw in obedience into the bargain.—I am, Sir, &c.,
HELEN TAYLOR.
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