grand monde n'en sont pas pour les femmes heureuses," p. 189.]




A COPARTNERSHIP


Marriage, considered merely in its financial and business relations, may be
regarded as a permanent copartnership.

Now, in an ordinary copartnership there is very often a complete division
of labor among the partners. If they manufacture locomotive-engines, for
instance, one partner perhaps superintends the works, another attends to
mechanical inventions and improvements, another travels for orders, another
conducts the correspondence, another receives and pays out the money. The
latter is not necessarily the head of the firm. Perhaps his place could be
more easily filled than some of the other posts. Nevertheless, more money
passes through his hands than through those of all the others put together.
Now, should he, at the year's end, call together the inventor and the
superintendent and the traveller and the correspondent, and say to them,
"I have earned all this money this year, but I will generously give you
some of it,"--he would be considered simply impertinent, and would hardly
have a chance to repeat the offence the year after.

Yet precisely what would be called folly in this business partnership is
constantly done by men in the copartnership of marriage, and is there
called "common sense" and "social science" and "political economy."

For instance, a farmer works himself half to death in the hayfield, and his