hew, in fact, thinks of marriage,
and that his conditions are this and that; he tells his nephew that
the most beautiful and amiable creature in Germany, a brilliant
musician, a fluent linguist, a devoted daughter, and a person of
simple housewifely tastes, lives next door to him, the uncle. Except
for the housewifely tastes, it sounds, and in fact is, rather like a
courtship in the _Arabian Nights_ so far. The prince hears of the
princess, and without having seen her sets out to seek her hand. The
young merchant pays a flying visit to Frankfurt, is presented to the
most beautiful creature in Germany, finds her passable, has a talk to
her father as business-like as a talk between two solicitors,
proposes, is accepted, and at once becomes the most ardent lover the
world has ever seen.

Amongst Christians marriages are certainly not arranged for girls in
this matter-of-course way, and so "old maids" abound. Girls without
money have far less chance of marriage in Germany than in England,
where young people mate as they please and where a man expects to
support his wife entirely; while the spectacle, quite common here, of
girls with a good deal of money remaining single from various reasons,
sometimes actually from want of opportunity to marry, this every-day
occurrence amongst the English better classes is unknown on the
continent. In her powerful novel _Aus guter Familie_, Gabrielle Reuter
describes the life of a German girl whose parents cannot give her a
dowry, and who is doomed in consequence to old maidhood and to all the
disappointments, restrictions, and humiliations of unsought women.
While women look to marriage and nothing else for happiness, there
must be such lives in every monogamous country, where they outnumber
the men; but in England a woman's marriage is much more a matter of
chance and charm than of money. If she is poor and misses her chance
she is worse off than the German, for she has no _Stift_ provided for
her; but if she is attractive she is just as likely to marry without a
fortune as with one. Those German women who consider their ideas
"progressive" have taken up a new cry of late, a cry about every
woman's "right" to motherhood; but they do not seem to have found a
satisfactory way of securing this right to the 400,000 women who
outnumber the men. One learned professor wrote a pamphlet advocating
polygamy, but his proposal did not have the success he no doubt felt
it deserved. The women who dis