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Summer Session Kansan Tuesday. July 21, 1959
More Marrying Earlier
The marriage rate, which declined sharply during the recession, is on the rise again. In 1957 and 1958 marriages in the United States decreased by about 4 per cent each year.
Statistics available for early 1959 indicate that the rate is going up. In addition, many more Americans are approaching marriage as the baby-boom children reach adulthood. And they are marrying at an early age.
The earlier marriages will have a strong effect on the birth rate in the years ahead—and unfortunately, probably, on the divorce rate, too. The Population Reference Bureau, Inc., notes that last year the average age of first-time marriages in the United States was 23 for men and 20 for women, the lowest averages in our history.
In 1958 more than 45 per cent of the women marrying for the first time were teen-agers. And
one of 20 divorced women who remarried was in her teens.
The rate of teen-age marriages in a specific state can be controlled by law. The Statistical Bulletin of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. reports that states with the most marked decreases in marriages are those states that have raised the age limits. Whether this has much effect on the national rate is debatable.
The few states with increases in marriages last year generally adjoined those that had advanced the age requirements. Apparently the state line, in many instances, simply is the gateway to early marriage.
Teen-age marriage seems to be a current sociological trend that only economic recession can reverse. But if early marriages in our age are inevitable, the divorce rate indicates that they often are not permanent.-Kansas City Star
Conformity: The Menace
Juvenile delinquency, which is seen everywhere in the United States, is a problem which remains unsolved today. The teenage delinquents have been the brunt of many criticisms, some just, some not. We wish to stand up for these offenders.
It is not simply the teenage delinquent's fault that he commits errors which brand him a delinquent. For, we believe, no teenager is basically a better human being than his delinquent friends.
They must learn to be delinquents. We assert that it is the society which teaches the teenager to be a delinquent. And when we say society, we mean parents, teachers, and adults in general. They are responsible for this problem which they continually complain about.
One of the basic causes of teenage delinquency is one of our societies' demands on the teenager: Conform. And adults are the ones who force upon these youths the idea that they should conform—should strive for acceptance by their fellow teenagers. Conformity, to a degree, is essential, but conforming for the sake of conforming is senseless.
The delinquents, themselves, have minds of their own, certainly. But their thinking has been moulded by adults since their childhood. If parents would not spare the rod; if they would guide their children along the path of healthy individualism; and if all adults would take a bigger interest in youth, juvenile delinquency would diminish. The Daily O'Collegian
Daily Crossword Puzzle
ACROSS
1 Ready money.
5 Perform again.
10 Trade.
14 Expression of surprise: 2 words.
15 Emotional warmth.
16 Murder.
17 "The ___ and I."
18 Bread-spread: 2 words.
20 Common saying.
22 Fine.
23 Resting place.
25 Evenly scored contest.
26 Realtor's sign: 2 words.
29 Political decampers.
33 Chopping tool.
34 Type of sweater.
36 Nuncupative, as a will.
37 First public appearance.
38 Menagerie.
40 Five-dollar bill: Slang: 2 words.
41 Notices.
42 Spirit.
44 Witness.
45 Crossed out.
47 Deeply convinced.
49 Family member.
50 Kind of breakfast juice.
51 Lean back.
54 ___ ultrate (furthest limit):
2 words.
58 Lowered in worth.
60 Pueblo Indian.
61 Incense.
62 Pontifical ornament.
63 Black.
64 Circulates.
65 Foxily.
66 Go; Poet.
DOWN
1 Torsorial tool.
2 Nautical术语.
3 Skier's delight.
4 Trump cards.
5 Child's plaything.
6 Fluff a line, as in radio.
7 Conform.
8 Be a match for.
9 Where Washington crossed the Delaware.
10 Body's framework.
11 Lose strength.
12 Helper.
13 Single thickness or fold.
14 Lockup.
21 Cook.
24 Caught.
26 Vanished.
27 Daisy.
28 Resist authority.
29 Football team's punter.
30 Jagged.
31 Resort prices.
32 Unpleasant driving weather.
35 ___ roast.
38 Bargains on the lot; 2 words.
40 Creator of Captain Nemo.
42 Means.
43 Wash.
44 Statuesque.
48 Male relative.
50 Contemptible.
51 Decorate again.
52 Cry of revelry.
53 Secure.
55 Part of the ear.
56 ___ my word!
57 Where Karachi is.
58 Canine.
59 Look-alike of the oarfish.
Pakistan Will Move Capital
A seaport and industrial center, Karachi is the Moslem republic's largest metropolis, the National Geographic Society says. In 12 years since the partition of British India, the refugee-choked city's population has grown from 300,000 to 1,500,000.
WASHINGTON — Pakistan is making long-range plans to move the federal capital inland from overcrowded Karachi.
Seas of mud and straw huts surround Karachi's handsome, 19th-century buildings and broad avenues. Vital facilities—water, light, and housing are strained to the breaking point.
The new capital will be built on a green plateau in the mountainous north near Rawalpindi. To the east is Kashmir, a pocket of lush valleys guarded by the Himalayas. To the west are Khyber Pass and the bare, bulking shoulders of ranges in the North-West Frontier Provinces.
Rawalpindi was once British India's largest military station. Tales of frontier wars with tribesmen have been told and retold in fiction. The city is now the Pakistani Army's headquarters.
A healthy climate, availability of food, water, and building materials, as well as defense, were factors in the selection of the Rawalpindi site in the fertile Punjab.
The new capital will not rise overnight. The move will be made in stages over a considerable period of time as resources of the young, hard-pressed nation permit.
Journalists have always been our most old-fashioned class, being too busy with the news of the day to lay aside the mental habits of fifty years before.—Frank Moore Colby
Dailu Hansan
(Published Tuesdays and Fridays)
NEWS DEPARTMENT
News Room Phone 711
Janet Jimmel
Associate Editor Mary Mill
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
BUSINESS DEPARTMINT
Business Manager 316
Business Manager Bill Kane
By W. D. Paden
Professor of English
CONSORT FOR VICTORIA, by Vaughan Wilkins. Doubleday,
$3.95.
A good many readers will be delighted with "Consort for Victoria," which is an almost perfect novel for a drowsy afternoon in a hammock or a languid air-conditioned evening. According to the publisher, Mr. Willkins novels are "known for their sound historical background as well as for their fast pace and suspenseful plotting." In a university, it may be worthwhile to admit the pace and the suspense, and consider the very odd fashion in which the book is related to history.
On Oct.15, 1839, the youthful Victoria of England managed with some natural awkwardness to inform her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, that she wished to marry him, and received his cordial assent. This is history, and Mr. Wilkins has made it the prologue and epilogue of his novel. But he has not treated it as history, or provided an authentic background.
At that time the monarch of England had large power in the state and a conventional, rather insecure, hold upon the loyalty of the people. When in 1831 the young Charles Darwin had been forced by the closing of all the London shops to interrupt his preparations for the voyage of the Beagle, he had yielded to an impulse he himself called childish and paid a guinea for a good view of the coronation of William IV.
"The King looked very well, and seemed popular," Darwin wrote a sister, "but there was very little enthusiasm; so that I can hardly think there will be a coronation this time fifty years." He was in error.
In the England of our day, royalty manifests a high, even a grim, sense of responsibility, and steady moral worth, and vast popular appeal, while it practices a set of gestures no more than ceremonial. Within the past two years Elizabeth II has ceased to receive and greet the season's debutantes as a sign of their formal acceptance by society, for the custom roused bitter criticism from the left. Royalty, in other words, cannot acknowledge any specially close relation to the wealthy and the powerful, lest by that act it imply less sympathy with the poor and the oppressed.
Many of us welcome stories about English monarchs; we accept them as romantic figures, whatever their epoch. And as their present values have been evolved within the last century, the earlier monarchs suffer strange metamorphoses when they are recalled to mind.
One must accept the fact that Mr. Wilkins has written a fantasy, set in the British Court of 1839 but designed to excite the emotions while flattering the vanity of those fairly young women of the 20th century who, despite their essentially noble natures, pass their days in undistinguished commercial occupations. Then one may admire the skill with which the story is made to whiz sweetly onward, through a sequence of crises and revelations, to the final embrace of honest sentiment, matrimonially inclined.
THE RETURN, by Herbert Mitgang. Simon and Schuster, $3.50.
By Alexandra Mason Watson Library
"The Return" is first the story of a former GI who goes back to Sicily, the scene of his combat experience, and there finds again a woman he had known during the war. Joseph Borken is a geologist who, although working for an organization, cannot be an organization man. After his second sojourn in Sicily he leaves his job and strikes out on his own with his newly wife and his newly discovered self.
It was once said that, since Lincoln books, doctor books, and dog books sold well, the all-time best-seller would be "Lincoln's Doctor's Dog." "The Return" has important and timely subjects strewn thickly enough through its pages to be considered a good try at "The Thinking Man's Lincoln's Doctor's Dog."
Beyond this fairly simple sequence of events, Mitgang's book contains international power rings, atomic energy, big business, the struggles of Sicilian peasants against feudal landlords, fascism, communism, European and American attitudes toward Europeans and Americans, and, finally, an eruption of Mt. Etna.
The book is quite well, even very well, written, although Greene and Hemingway are perhaps too obvious models in style as well as in subject. Still, although one cannot point to any one outstanding flaw or sign of ineptness, it remains a book which you put down without pleasure, without displeasure, and never pick up again.
The carefully unstipulated emotions which are hinted at remain unstipulated. At the beginning of the book Joseph Borken doesn't know who he is, at the end he obviously does; but the reader doesn't. It would appear that the subjects involved either are too close to the author or were chosen because of their topicality. At any rate, they are not at the right distance to write about.
It seems very likely that Mr. Mitgang will write a really good book some day; he can write. But this is not the book.
DOCTOR AND SON, by Richard Gordon. Doubleday. $2.95.
Another chapter in the farcical life of Simon Sparrow, M.D. Like the earlier members of the series ("Doctor in the House," "Doctor at Sea") it is aimed at the film industry; unlike them it will not be a very amusing film. Dr. Gordon seems to be running out.—Alexandra Mason.
More important than winning the election, is governing the nation. That is the test of a political party—the acid, final test.-Adlai E. Stevenson