A Writer Asserts That Wealth’s Marriage Into the “Working Classes” Will
Benefit the Race.
It is not altogether increasing newspaper sensationalism that indicates
a larger number of marriages between rich men and poor girls. There are,
it seems safe to say, more and more such marriages.
The judge does not always ride sadly away and leave Maud Müller raking
hay. Frequently he departs only to get a marriage license and return
post-haste. And Maud drops her rake right gladly and directs the way to
the nearest justice of the peace.
Says the New York _Medical Journal_:
Marriages are constantly occurring in the United States between young
men of great wealth and young women engaged in earning their own
living; but, despite the familiarity of the phenomenon, no such
marriage ever fails to cause apparently astonished comment, and, above
all, copious newspaper gossip.
In Europe, where those who have inherited wealth are taught and really
believe that they are of superior clay to the class of inherited
poverty, and the latter assent to the teaching, such alliances may
well cause a slight shock, diluted perhaps with some pleasure at the
condescension of the man.
In our country, however, where one family can hardly have the pas of
another by a single century, astonishment is ridiculous and out of
place. Few of our richest men are idle, and their work differs only in
magnitude from that of the poor.
If we grant that a century of idleness can enervate a family, a
marriage into the “working classes” can only be beneficial. Stock must
be enriched from time to time from near the soil.
Advocates of highly restricted interbreeding are fond of pointing to
the race-horse as a superior product of their principles. A
race-horse, however, is a poor creature from the point of view of
usefulness; he is a beautiful specialized bundle of nerves, and
requires more coddling than a healthy human baby.
Interbreeding does not work out well in the human species; the haughty
Austrian aristocracy, which considers the nobility of France and
England as upstarts, and ostracizes any member who marries into a
family much younger than the Cæsars, is not as a class strong and
healthy.
It is from Austria in great measure that our circuses secure their
giants and midgets, and many other of the various “freaks,” objects of
interest certainly, but hardly of pride.
Intellectually, we do not think that the statesmen of Austria, Spain,
and Russia are the equals of those of France and the United States,
while the English commoners have given a remarkable account of
themselves.
We should be disposed to applaud the good sense of any rich young
American who married a beautiful girl of poor but decent antecedents,
in spite of the fact that such marriages depend upon unreasoning
sexual attraction, like the great majority of marriages. As it is, we
can only note the care Nature takes of a race, however heedless she
may be of the individual.