THE EVOLUTION OF COLONIES. 579 



currency of those days, was sometimes four gallons of rum, or five 

 pounds sterling and a gallon, or twenty sheep and a gallon; one 

 woman was sold for fifty sheep. 



Around gold and silver mining encampments nondescript rela- 

 tionships of a slightly higher order arise. They are with free women, 

 though the women are apt to be of the same class as Bret ITarte's 

 Duchess of Poker Flat, answering to the Doll Tearsheets of hardly 

 more civilized communities. They often issue in marriage. In min- 

 ing townships, and even in colonial towns, professional men are to 

 be found married to unpresentable women. 



In colonies of regular foundation normal marriages are con- 

 tracted under difficulties. Few women at first go out, the emigrants 

 intending to return when they have made their fortune. Women 

 have accordingly to be sent. In the seventeenth century a number 

 of girls of good repute were persuaded to emigrate to Virginia, a 

 subscription being raised to defray the cost. In the following cen- 

 tury wives were sent to settlers in French Louisiana on the same plan. 

 To French Canada women were dispatched by shiploads. They were 

 selected (according to Parkman) as butchers choose cattle: the 

 plumpest were preferred, because they could stand the winter best 

 and would stay at home. In Virginia women were offered for sale 

 to eager colonists, who willingly paid one hundred pounds of tobacco 

 for one, or as much as one hundred and fifty pounds for a very pretty 

 girl; a debt incurred for the purchase of a wife being considered a 

 debt of honor. In the early days of Canterbury, New Zealand, when 

 a consignment of servant girls arrived, young farmers would ride 

 over the Port hills and carry them off, though in the style rather of 

 young Lochinvar than of the Sabine rape. Settlers have often re- 

 quested the agent general for the colony or the mayor of their native 

 town to send them out a wife. Wives so easily acquired are apt to 

 be lightly parted with, and within the last few years, in colonial 

 villages, amicable exchanges have been effected — one woman going 

 with her children to the house of another man, whose wife and chil- 

 dren made a reciprocal migration. Facts such as these (which might 

 readily be multiplied) show how easily so-called civilized man sloughs 

 off the conventions of ages and sinks to a primitive level. They soon 

 disappear, however, and social colonial conditions rapidly assimilate 

 themselves to those of the mother country. In most young colonies 

 marriage is universal and it is early. After a few days' acquaintance 

 couples rashly engage themselves, in utter ignorance of one another's 

 character or of their own, and a precipitate marriage follows, with 

 such results as might be expected. Statistics show that the age of 

 marriage on the part of women is steadily rising. In the early days 

 of each colony a girl was deemed passee if she did not get married be- 



