CHAPTER XL

A FINANCIAL STUDY FOR OUR YOUNG MARRIED COUPLE

THIRTY years ago I held a heart-to-heart talk with reasonable, well-meaning husbands on the vital subject of the monetary relations between man and wife.

I quote a paragraph, the force of which has been confirmed to my mind by the additional experience and observation of three more decades than were set to my credit upon the age-roll when I penned the words:

“I have studied this matter long and seriously, and I offer you, as the result of my observation in various walks of life, and careful calculation of labor and expense, the bold assertion that every wife who performs her part, even tolerably well, in whatsoever rank of society, more than earns her living, and that this should be an acknowledged fact with both parties to the marriage contract. The idea of her dependence upon her husband is essentially false and mischievous, and should be done away with, at once and forever. It has crushed self-respect out of thousands of women; it has scourged thousands from the marriage-altar to the tomb, with a whip of scorpions; it has driven many to desperation and crime.”

I have headed this chapter “A Financial Study for Our Young Married Couple,” because I have little hope of changing the opinions and custom of the mature benedict. Our youthful wedded pair should come to a rational mutual understanding in the first week of housekeeping as to an equitable division of the income on which they are to live together.

If you—our generic “John”—shrink from coming down to “cold business” before the echoes of the wedding-bells have died in ear and in heart, call the discussion a “matter of marriage etiquette,” and approach it confidently. And do you, Mrs. John, meet his overtures in a straightforward, sensible way, with no foolish shrinking from the idea of even apparent independence of him to whom you have entrusted your person and your happiness?

[Sidenote: THE WIFE’S PORTION]

It is, of course, your part to harken quietly to whatever proposition your more businesslike spouse may make as to the just partition, not of his means, which are likewise yours, but of the sums you are respectively to handle and to spend. Do not accept what he apportions for your use as a benefaction. He has endowed you with all his worldly goods, and the law confirms the endowment to a certain extent. You are a co-proprietor—not a pensioner. If, while the glamour of Love’s Young Dream envelops and dazes you, you are chilled by what seems sordid and commonplace, take the word of an old campaigner for it that the time will come when your “allowance” will be a factor in happiness as well as in comfort.

May I quote to John another and a longer extract from the thirty-year-old “Talk concerning Allowances”?

[Sidenote: LEARN TO SAY WE]

“Set aside from your income what you adjudge to be a reasonable and liberal sum for the maintenance of your household in the style suitable for people of your means and position. Determine what purchases you will yourself make, and what shall be entrusted to your wife, and put the money needed for her proportion into her care as frankly as you take charge of your share. Try the experiment of talking to her as if she were a business partner. Let her understand what you can afford to do, and what you can not. If in this explanation you can say ‘we’ and ‘ours,’ you will gain a decided moral advantage, although it may be at the cost of masculine prejudice and pride of power. Impress upon her mind that a certain sum, made over to her apart from the rest, is hers absolutely, not a present from you, but her honest earnings, and that _you_ would not be honest were you to withhold it. And do not ask her ‘if that will do?’ any more than you would address the question to any other woman. With what cordial detestation wives regard that brief query which drops, like a sentence of the Creed, from husbandly lips, I leave your spouse to tell you. Also, if she ever heard of a woman who answered anything but ‘Yes!’”

Carrying out the idea of co-partnership, should your wife exceed her allowance, running herself, and consequently you, into debt, meet the exigency as you would a similar indiscretion on the part of a young and inexperienced member of your firm. Treat the extravagance as a mistake, not a fault. Not one girl-wife in one hundred, who has not been a wage-earner, has had any experience in the management of finances. The father gives the daughter money when she (or her mother) tells him that she needs it, or would like to have it. When it is gone he is applied to for more. She has been a beneficiary all her life, usually an irresponsible, thoughtless recipient of what is lavished or doled out to her, according to the parental whim and means.

[Sidenote: LEARNING BUSINESS METHODS]

Teach her business methods, tactfully, yet decidedly.

One young wife I wot of began keeping the expense-book, presented to her by her husband, with these entries:

“_January fourth._ Received $75.00 (Seventy-five dollars).

“_January sixth._ Spent $70.25 shopping, etc.

“Balance—$4.75 set down to Profit and Loss.”

After fifteen years of married life her husband died, bequeathing the whole of a large estate to her, and making her sole guardian of their three children,—a confidence fully justified by her conduct of the affairs thus committed to her.

“My husband trained me patiently and thoroughly,” she said to one who complimented her financial sagacity. “I was an ignoramus when we were married.”

Then, laughingly, she related the “profit and loss” incident.

It is the fashion to sneer at women’s business methods. Who are to blame for their blunders?

[Sidenote: MONEY AS A TOY]

Should your wife play with her allowance, as a child with a new toy, let censure fall upon those who have kept her in leading-strings. Teach her gradually to comprehend her responsibilities. The sense of them will steady her unless she be exceptionally feather-brained. Be she wasteful or frugal, the allowance you have made to her is as honestly hers to have, to hold or to spend, as the third of your estate which the law will give her in the event of your death.

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[Sidenote: SETTLEMENTS]

“Settlements,” according to the English sense of the word, are not yet common in the United States. One American father, whose daughter was on the eve of marriage with an Englishman, ordered the prospective bridegroom out of the house when the foreigner queried innocently as to the “settlements” the future father-in-law intended to make upon his child.

A man with a reputation for fortune-hunting had nearly rid himself of the slur by insisting that his fiancée’s large estate should be settled absolutely upon herself. Her quondam guardian put a different complexion on the generous act by divulging the circumstance that the husband, by the same “settlement,” had made himself sole trustee of his wife’s property of every description.

While there are, perhaps, fewer purely mercenary marriages in our country than in any other, it can not be denied that a large proportion of enterprising young men act, consciously, or unwittingly, on the advice of the Scotchman who warned his son not to marry for money, but in seeking a wife, “to gae where money is.”

“Is he marrying her fortune, or herself?” asked one gossip of another when an approaching bridal was spoken of.

“They _say_ he is very much in love with her!” was the answer, uttered dubiously. “I fancy, however, that he would have repressed his passion, if she were a poor girl.”

Which brings us to a much more delicate matter than the division of the income earned, or inherited, by the bridegroom.

It is a fact that may have much significance—or none—that the bride makes no mention of endowing her husband with all, or any portion, of her worldly goods. It is likewise significant that laws (of man’s devising) take it for granted that her property goes with her, so that in most of our states it is his without other act of gift than the marriage ceremony.

[Sidenote: MARRYING FOR MONEY]

The man who marries for money has no scruples as to the acceptance and the use of it. Sometimes it is squandered; sometimes, but not often, it is hoarded; most frequently “it goes into the husband’s business” and is invested by him for the benefit of himself and his family.

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[Sidenote: THE BRIDE’S DOWRY]

The nicer issue with which we have to do is how our conscientious John, who would have married his best girl if she had not possessed one penny in her own right, is to comport himself with regard to the fortune, modest or considerable, which she brings to him as dowry.

Briefly and clearly—as a trust not to be committed to the chances and changes of his individual ventures. No investment should be made of his wife’s money without her knowledge and full consent. In all that he does, where her funds are involved, he should be her actuary, and what profits result from “operations” with her funds should be settled on herself and children. By this course alone can he retain his self-respect, his reputation as an honorable man, and certainly disabuse his wife’s mind of any possible suspicion that his affection was not wholly for her.