MONEY AND MATRIMONY.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume IX, Issue 7, 13 February 1892, Page 151

MONEY AND MATRIMONY.

MONEY generally leads to matrimony ; that is to say, heiresses generally get husbands. But whether money helps matrimony to fulfil its objects is a question. Recently a young girl of twenty-two married one of the best known of the gilded youth. Fifteen years ago, the young lady’s grandfather died leaving her a trifle of £1,400,000, to be tied up till she married or became twenty-one years of age. On the approach of her nuptials, her trustees deemed fit to render their accounts. They showed her to be the unconditional possessor of £4,400,000, judiciously invested in in-come-bearing property. It almost takes one’s breath away to think of these two young people, who are little more than boy and girl, having an income of probably not less than £250,000 a year to spend, say £20,000 a month, no state to keep up, and no probable danger of their property ever becoming less. But their friends, if they have foresight and knowledge of the world, will be concerned to reflect that the possession of such vast wealth is in itself an element not of concord but of discord. Cares grow with property ; every fresh acquisition furnishes a new chance of friction. When young people marry on a mere livelihood, they have little to divert them from the business of loving ; they are all in all to each other, and their very unsatisfied wants furnish each of them with something to hope for in the future, in order to increase the other’s happiness. Whereas, the millionaire and millionairess have a hundred objects of care and solicitude which divert their minds from the contemplation of each other They have town houses, and country houses, and lands, and yachts, and travels, and jewellery, and entertainments, and investments to think of ; and on every one of these differences of opinion may arise, which may ripen into controversies and degenerate into quarrels. They labour under the tremendous disadvantage of having no wish that cannot be gratified. And the life of a human being without longings is a life without hope or savour. It has been the good or the evil fortune of new modern cities to grow an unprecedented crop of rich men in the few years of their existence. From these rich men have sprung a race of young men and young women who began life as their fathers ended it—with prodigious wealth. From the necessities of the case, these involuntary possessors of riches have become the cynosure of eyes on matrimony bent. Every pretty girl secretly expects to marry a man who can live without work ; every good-looking and well-mannered young fellow is on the look-out for an heiress. The result is very bad indeed, and its evil fruits are already apparent. The boys drift into old bachelorhood, with a prospect of crabbed old age ; the girls miss the chance of becoming the loved wives of honest men and the mothers of happy children. They are so bent on marrying money that some of them do not marry at all. The natural destiny of young people is to marry when they are poor and to rely upon the reward of the husband’s labour for lodgment and bread. It is in such unions that the truest happiness is found. Work is the surest guarantee for enjoyment in life—steady, unremitting, conscientious work, which hardly ever fails to command its reward. The woman who marries the young man with an income that is only made sufficient for their support by dint of forethought and economy may not be able to wear as fine dresses as her sister who espoused a millionaire’s son, but she has a much surer prospect of happiness in life, much less chance of domestic jars, and far smaller danger of divorce. Life is like a rolling prairie ; valley succeeds upland, and hill follows level plain ; he who starts out to cross it from a height is apt to find himself in a hollow before the end of the day, while he who sets out from bottom land may reach an eminence by night. The rich young man and his rich young wife cut a gorgeous figure when they return from the honeymoon and call in their carriage upon the poor sister who is living in a small Hat ; but it is not so sure that, when their heads are grey, it will not be the poor sister who is riding in the carriage, and the broken down ex-millionaire who is occupying the Hat.