THE MARRIAGE MARKET.
WE once ventured to assert in these pages that the day before the end of the world two subjects would be sure to be under universal discussion,—one was "the de- generacy of manners daring the last thirty years," and the other "the badness of modern servants." We depicted, that is, man's last word on mankind as "The younger generation don't know how to behave" and "Where will you find any servants like the old ones?" We ought to have added a third, —the complaint that the fashionable world is nothing but a marriage market in which unfortunate girls are exposed for sale to the highest bidder by their cruel, heartless, and
avaricious mothers. It was a grave oversight to have left out that extremely hardy perennial among complaints, ancient and modern. There never was an age in which the marriage market accusation was not made again and again, and there probably never will be one. It would be preposterous to expect otherwise. As long as marriage remains one of the most important, if not the most important, event in life, and so long as men and women prefer being rich to being poor, so long parents will be accused of selling their daughters and of opening a marriage exchange in their drawing-rooms. It is easy enough to see how the accusation arises. A female Socrates would not have the slightest difficulty in proving, out of her own mouth, to the mother of a marriageable girl that she was anxious that her daughter should marry a rich man, and that she took her daughter out to balls and parties, Sze. —put her in the shop-window, in fact—in order to get her a husband. `Do you wish your daughter to marry ?' would be the first question of the Socratic spinster.—' Yes, I do,' 'would be the reply. 'Tom and I have, on the whole, been very happy, and I don't think old maids are ever—'—' That is enough, thank you; please answer my questions plainly and don't give any reasons, they are quite superfluous for our .present purpose. Now tell me—considering that you want your daughter to marry—would you like her to marry a rich man or a poor one ?—a plain answer, please.'—' Oh, well, if I knew neither of the men, I suppose I should say a rich one. I've seen so much unhappiness come from poverty, and Agnes, though you wouldn't think it to look at her, is so very careless about money,—she has twelve pairs of shoes, all quite smart, and bought two more pairs last week ; and what she would do as a poor man's wife I can't conceive. Oh, I beg your pardon. Yes, certainly I should feel more happy if she married a rich man.'—' Very well,' our female Socrates would continue, we have arrived so far. You want your daughter to marry a rich man. Exactly. Now, I suppose you will admit that when people desire a certain thing, and are anxious it should happen, they take certain steps to carry out their object,—do, in fact, what they can to bring about the fulfilment of their desire. Even wild animals do so, do they not? How much more a reasoning being like you, Mrs. Bowling ? We may assume, then, that you take steps to bring about the marrying of your daughter, which you desire, and also of her marriage to a rich man. Now, as to these steps. I should like to ask you whether you did not persuade Mr. Bowling to leave Bowling Hall last winter and take a large house in Eaton Place, and give three dances, because you said there were no young men in Fallowshire, and that it was not fair on Agnes, and that the poor child would never make a nice marriage unless you did, since, in spite of her good looks and your position, nobody married really well except they made friends in London; and did you not add that the idea of a girl with her looks and birth marrying a country solicitor like Mr. Tebbe or a doctor like young Brown was utterly preposterous F Well, suppose I did, it was no more—" Please, please, I did not want you to explain, only to admit the fact that you did give parties in order that Agnes might have the chance of meeting eligible young men, and that you took her out with the same object.'—' Well, yes ; and I see no harm in it.' — Of course not. But please notice, then, that we have come to this. You want Agnes to marry a rich man, and you take her out and give parties in order that a rich man may meet her and marry her. Now, admitting this, and knowing that as you hint every one else does the same, I want to know, Mrs. Bowling, whether you can deny that there is such a thing as the Belgravian marriage market, and that you keep a stall in it with your daughter Agnes on sale? I have, as you will I am sure acknowledge, asserted nothing myself but merely arranged more clearly the facts admitted by you.' Poor Mrs. Bowling's reply to the final question of the female Socrates may, we think, be more easily imagined than set forth. Probably it would be firm and incoherent, and something on this model I'm sure I never said anything of the kind, and I don't know what you mean except that I know all this talk about a marriage market is all nonsense and very vulgar too, and not the sort of thing that nice people ever have anything to do with, and what puts such things into your head, Miss Porchester, I really can't think. How can you know ? You've never been married yourself and had children. If you had, you'd think very differently. Don't, please, tell me it was I who said there was a marriage market. I never did. You evidently did not understand me; its like the second-class society papers that Agnes says her maid tells her things out of. No; I won't argue it out again, it makes one so hot, and really, indeed, you can't understand anything about it, even if you are older and have read a great deal more than many married women. It's like servants. As cook says about Agnes when she's doing the housekeeping, "Young ladies never exactly understand." Well, I really feel quite confused with all the questions you've asked me, and I'm sore you ought to have been a great lawyer. You would have done splendidly when it was necessary to make witnesses say something they didn't mean to. At any rate, you may be quite sure I'd much rather Agnes married a poor man who would be really nice to her than a rich one who wouldn't. That goes without saying. Only, unfortunately, all the poor men aren't good, as the people who write to the magazines seem to think. Of course, the rich men aren't always good either. I'm afraid, indeed, that its pure chance with both.'
A Socratic dialogue such as we have just given would very aptly sum up the general result of the modern aspects of the eternal marriage market controversy. It can apparently be shown that something like a marriage market exists, in which the mothers try to Bell their daughters to the best advantage; and yet all the time it is quite obvious that the mothers are doing nothing of the kind, but are only trying to get their daughters "comfortably settled,"—a very natural and very sensible action. In truth there is more foolish nonsense written about the marriage market than on any other subject under heaven. In the first place, the analogy is altogether a. false one. How can a person be said to sell when she gets nothing by the sale, for except in very rare cases the mother gets nothing tangible by her daughter's marriage F Of course occasionally a mother does force her daughter to marry a rich man against her will, or insists upon her abandoning a poor one. As a rule, however, it is the want of money sufficient to keep a wife, not the machinations of the mother, which defeats the poor man. If, though poor, he is in a position to marry, and the young lady is really anxious to become his wife, the mother may tell her daughter she is an idiot, but she can do little else. Very often we may suspect that the tales of the mothers selling their unhappy daughters to wealthy men, and so robbing the poor of their natural prizes, are invented by poor men as salves to their wounded feelings. It is pleasanter to think that the girl was sold by her mother than to admit that, when she had to face the question of living with Mr. Brown in a hut on water and a crust, she concluded that it was not worth while. A good deal of very sensible talk about the whole subject of the alleged marriage market is to be found in Lady Jeune's article in the Lady's Realm for April entitled " The Modern Marriage Market : a Reply to Marie Corelli." Lady Jeune shows how absurd the whole accusation is, and traverses with special success the ridiculous suggestion that girls are as much brought in the season to be sold " as any unhappy Armenian girl." No doubt a certain amount of the London festivities are primarily arranged to give young people the chance of seeing each other, but to call this a female slave market is mere mid- summer madness. The truth about the whole question is, we believe, something of this kind. A certain number of women marry solely for love. A certain, and perhaps larger, number marry for reasons in which love and the desire to have a home of their own and money of their own are mixed up. Another small section marry purely from reasons of ambition, usually of a pecuniary kind,—i.e., with the idea of becoming great personages through marriage. As a rule, however, these mercenary marriages are made not by a designing mother who wishes to sell her daughter, but by a designing, or rather ambitions, girl who deliberately wishes to climb the world's ladder by marriage. The girls who deliberately try to better their position by marriage are, however, by no means necessarily despicable people. A few are. Those, for example, who deliberately marry rich men of known bad character, very old men, or men of feeble intellect, or men they dislike. The maj eity, however, are very like the ambitious men who deliberately prefer getting on by marriage to marrying for other considerations, and so choose a rich wife. Theoretically, these must be rather
unpleasant and repulsive people. As a matter of fact, how- ever, they are often nothing of the kind, and end by making very good husbands. So is it with thousands of the girls who are said to sell themselves for money. We do not, of course, want to defend mercenary marriages, and we detest the notion of girls being brought up to think that money is the only object in life. It is, however, absolutely necessary to speak out about the current cant concerning the marriage market. That, as a rule, is mere rhetoric, and when it means anything, means that most naturally mothers, other things being equal, prefer that their daughters should be without pecuniary cares. Our Mrs. Bowling puts the feeling quite correctly when she says that if she does not know either of the men, she prefers the rich one. Depend upon it, indigence and virtue are no more convertible terms than riches and vice.
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