The States And Union

Mercenary Marriages.

Talk of foolish fancies as you like, ridicule romance, sneer at dove matches, you can never bring these things to the level of mercenary marriages. "Love is neither bread nor honey," perhaps; but neither are bread and honey love. Now I have something to say that makes my heart ache, because I am a woman. It is woman who marries oftenest for other things than love. Woman who goes into the market, adorned in all her beauty, saying to those who read her smiles aright: "Here I am to be married; somebody offer." Woman, whose love should be her life. It is true that a woman may not choose, but must be chosen; but can it be that a girl can coolly think of marriage in the abstract, forgetting all individual preference. I never knew a youth who did not say at least, "my wife must be a blonde or a brunette; she must be tall or short, gay or quiet;" who had not some ideal. But I have known girls innumerable, who have only said: "I will marry," with no more thought of love or admiration or respect or tenderness, before marriage could be than though such feeling were not. To marry—to have a marble fronted house, a carriage, diamonds; to marry (for ambition has its grades)—to have a kitchen and make pies in it; to marry to escape work; to marry—so that no one may utter the epithet, "old maid"—when there is such a thing as love in the world. One who knows it would rather die. Once there was a girl who loved her father's coachman married him. People were horrified: but if she loved the man, why the union was a holier one than that of Miss Belle, with old Guinea-bag's son, who was to her just so much bank stock. Do they hope for happiness, these women? Do they dream that they can play a part through life, and feign love amidst all the daily scenes that bring truth to the surface? It is shocking, a terrible thing to talk of when a man marries an heiress for her gold! but every day women do the same thing, and are applauded as having "made good matches." Oh, the cold, cheerless firesides! the couples who care not if seas roll between them! the men to whom home offers no attraction! Amidst all woman's wrongs men have theirs. and this is one—that some men must have a horrible consciousness that, at the altar, their wife's one thought must have been that she had secured some one to pay her bills for her. And woman's want of independence has done this. The shame it is to her is to labor for her own support; the half-pay vouchsafed to her, in many cases, when she does toil: or be it from me to deprive the clinging reliance upon her husband, which makes a woman's love so beautiful, when she is a true woman. But when daughters are taught to fill their places in the world as men are; when women are all able to win for themselves home and raiment, the time will come when the female fortune-hunter will be as rare as the male, and when the preference of an earnest, honest heart will be given where the hand is: when, at least, only mean and wicked women will offer themselves to the highest bidder, and not, as often happens to-day, girls meant by heaven to be pure, and good, and noble. to love and to be loved truly.