ABSTRACT
By the census of 1881 there were 188,954 more women than men aged twenty, and 116,502 more aged thirty. This excess of women over men at what may be called the marriageable age is not natural, but entirely of man's creating. In the Vital Statistics given in Whitaker's Almanac, according to the late Dr. Fair, more boys than girls are on the average born into England each year, i.e., out of every million 511,745 are boys, 488,255 are girls. This inequality does not redress itself by the average death-rate, and the women do not numerically surpass the men until they have reached the age of fifty-three, when out of each million born there remain alive 219,437 men and 219,698 women. We must therefore look to some other cause than death for the surplus of women over men. It is the army, navy, the merchant service, and our colonies that drain England of her men, and leave such a large number of women here at home vainly competing with one another to earn a bare subsistence. Hardest of all is this struggle upon the woman who has been tenderly nurtured; she not being trained to earn 302her living, sinks at once, therefore, into the lower ranks of workers, and, from her over-sensitive organization, feels the rebuffs she meets with, and the disagreeables of her surroundings, far more than the so-called working-woman. It is a great comfort then to think that ladies with a thorough knowledge of colonial life, and also with that friendly pleasant manner that goes further than a pound a-week extra to sweeten life to impoverished ladies, are helping those who are willing and able to work for a living to follow the great flood of men emigrants.
