“Without the wives to drive us, how many of us would go?” asks Bruce Barton in Hearst’s International for December, giving his arguments in favoring of marrying.
“Marriage gives a man a chance to rest. A bachelor gets no rest. If he is a good business man his mind goes right on conducting business after the office is closed; if he is no good he sits around a dismal apartment and hates himself.
“We husbands go home to another world—to Freddy’s marks in spelling, and the roller towel that needs tinkering, and Annie’s new dress, and all the news about the neighborhood. And to our own folks who know us and who care.
“Secondly, however bad a marriage may be, a bachelor’s life is worse. All candid bachelors admit it. Look at them as you pass the city clubs—staring out of the windows with unseeing eyes; dull, stolid, dreary, like the freaks at the circus or the beasts at the zoo. What are they thinking? What can they hope? What good are they anyway?
“Marriage increases a man’s expenses. This is an argument urged against it by the critics, but is, in fact, the third powerful argument in its behalf. For we are by nature lazy; we do what we have to do; and wives and children are the most insistent reason why we must do more.”
From page 3 of The Concord Daily Tribune, Nov. 25, 1924
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073201/1924-11-25/ed-1/seq-3/
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