“Then,” I said, “the women can divorce themselves at pleasure, but the men cannot dismiss them!  This hardly looks like equality.”

“The practical result,” he answered, “is that men don’t care for a release which would part them from complaisant slaves, and that women dare not seek a divorce which can only hand them over to another master on rather worse terms.  When the longer term has expired, the latter almost always prefer the servitude to which they are accustomed to an independent life of solitude and friendlessness.”

“And what becomes,” I asked, “of the younger men who must enter the world without property, without parents or protectors?”

“We are, after youth has passed, an indolent race.  We hardly care, as a rule, to cultivate our fields or direct our factories; but prefer devoting the latter half at least of our lives to a somewhat easy-going cultivation of that division of science which takes hold of our fancy.  These divisions are such as your conversation leads me to think you would probably consider absurdly minute.  A single class of insects, a single family of plants, the habits of one race of fishes, suffice for the exclusive study of half a lifetime.  Minds of a more active or more practical bent will spend an equal time over the construction of a new machine more absolutely automatic than any that has preceded it.  Physical labour is thrown as much as possible on the young; and even they are now so helped by machinery and by trained animals, that the eight hours’ work which forms their day’s labour hardly tires their muscles.  Our tastes render us very anxious to devolve upon others as soon as possible the preservation and development of the property we have acquired.  A man of moderate means, long before he has reached his thirtieth [7] year, generally seeks one assistant; men of larger fortune may want two, five, or ten.  These are chosen, as a rule, by preference from those who have passed the most stringent and successful collegiate examination.  Martial parents are not prolific, and the mortality in our public nurseries is very large.  I impute it to moral influences, since the chief cause of death is low vitality, marked nervous depression and want of animal spirits, such as the total absence of personal tenderness and sympathy must produce in children.  It is popularly ascribed to the over-cultivation of the race, as plants and animals highly civilised—­that is, greatly modified and bred to an artificial excellence by human agency—­are certainly delicate, unprolific, and especially difficult to rear.  There is little disease in the nurseries, but there is little health and a deficiency of nervous energy.  One fact is significant, however interpreted, and bears directly on your last question.  Since the wide extension of polygamy, female births are to male about as seven to six; but the deaths in public nurseries between the first and tenth years are twenty-nine in twelve dozen admissions in the stronger sex, and only about ten in the weaker.  Read these facts as we may, they ensure employment to the young men when their education is completed—­the two last years of severe study adding somewhat to the mortality among them.