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.