Democratic Sentinel, Volume 10, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 June 1886 — AUCTIONS. [ARTICLE]

AUCTIONS.

BY ANNIE E. MYERS.

It is a matter of history that women in Babylon were publicly auctioned off to the highest bidders for wives. This sale occurred annually among those old heathen, at which time all virgins of a marriageable age were required to assemble at a certain place in their respective districts, and thither flocked all the gay and frolicsome young pagans to select their wives.

No doubt the dandies fluttered and bobbed around, stopped here and there, put their turbaned heads together for confidential confabs, much after the fashion of the busy bee around an intoxicating clover blossom. The young fellows whose silken purses were well lined with gold and silver consulted and compared notes as to the comparative beauty of the candidates to come under the auctioneer’s hammer, gave passing attention to the probabilities in regard to the dispositions and tempers of the respective mothers-in-law elect, while the dusky swain whose bidding must be more modest, and whose tastes and desires must be regulated to enjoy what may be left, passed quietly yet observingly around, mingling freely in the midst of the excited throng, silently picking up points and waiting their chances, after the fashion of the hangers-on around the wheat-pit in the Chicago Board of Trade. The.style of conducting this Babylonian sale was quite American in its main points, but perhaps on a fairer basis than deals in “Sept.” wheat. The most beautiful was put up first, and he who bid the most money gained possession of her. The second in appearance followed, and the bidders gratified themselves with handsome wives according to the length of their purses. But, alas! Strange as it may appear to modern civilization—onr civilization in which eyery girl may become a wife if she can satisfy herself with what the gods provide—among the Babylonians there were some ladies for whom no money was offered. It seems that physical beauty aloue was the one thing desired in a wife. Those benighted heathen had not acquired the taste that could appreciate the sosthetio loveliness of even protoplasmic psychology. But the pagan dogs had all the inventive geuius of a maneuvering modern mamma, consequently when all the beautiful virgins were sold the crier the least handsome to stand up, when he would* demand who would marry her with a certain sum, then who with a smaller amount, until she would finally be adjudged to the one who would be satisfied with the

least. In this manner the money paid as premiums for beauty served as bribes for disagreeable looks. This custom emanated from the minds of idol worshipers, at least one hundred years before Christ came with His enlightening religion, but in what movement of reform, in what solution of mystifying social questions has a more humanitarian doctrine been adopted? The contemplation of this unique stroke of diplomacy has suggested a modem adaptation. Why would it not be a neat manner of disposing of our men? L se the premiums obtained from the sale of the lnckless young and old bachelors who seem incapable of getting themselves married, as bribes to hasten the disposal of married men whose wives are anxious to get rid of them. Until a man is married his failings are not observable, he is an adorable object in the eyes of all femininity, unless he wears green goggles or parts his hair in the middle, and most of them would go off under the auctioneer’s hammer like a dynamite bomb or hot cakes in a gentlemen’s restaurant, and the sum realized therefrom would be sufficiently large to greatly accelerate the disposal of the unfortunates whose wives have disclosed to the public their heretofore hidden deformities—men are so deceiving. If such a sale were to occur at this season of the year, the man who is never satisfied with the house he and his family occupy, thinks the rent too high, or the repairs not properly attended to by its landlord—the man whose wife is obliged to keep the chair-legs in canvas casings to be in readiness for the semi-annual flitting—would be the man who would probably require to be accompanied by the largest bribe. If not him, it would be the man whose wife is snubbed out of all chance of the most elementary self-assertion. The brute who is guilty of beating his wife would need a large portion to make him salable, but it would be insignificant compared with the amount required to launch the man who is able to paralyze add subdue his wife—in public. It is presumable that, among these deformed and unsatisfactory husbands, he who could be disposed of with the least ready cash would be the man who belongs to six elubs and lodges and had to “meet a friend” the seventh night, but who, with a modicum of grumbling, provides a liberal wherewithal for the new spring bonnet trimmed with a profusion of the flowers that bloom in the hat season. —Chicago Ledger.