A questionnaire recently submitted to the students at — a coeducational college asked: "Would you marry a person of sixty if he or she had a million dollars?" According to the newspaper reports the men answered with a 90-per-cent-plus verdict of no, while 90 per cent of the co-eds chorused an emphatic yes. Just how seriously this eagerness of the women may be taken is, as the estimate of all college questionnaires, somewhat doubtful. Professor Baber has shown (Some Mate Selection Standards of College Students and Their Parents, p. 3) in an investigation embracing a group of 642 college men and women that "economic status is a matter of small concern when it comes to selecting a mate. More than nine tenths of the boys and four fifths of the girls claimed they would show no hesitation in marrying some one with a smaller purse than their own."
Yet a small, determined group of young people regards high financial rating as an absolute prerequisite for happy marriage; and that millions of less determined girls draw a chiaroscuro dream-picture of their prince charming in gold and silver is equally incontestable.
These young women are the products of their age, the victims of our dollar-worshiping environment. The poor girl who marries a multimillionaire, the penniless stenographer whose hand is won by the president of the bank, the prairie school teacher who finds that her unassuming fiancé owns half of the State of Montana, — these overworked themes are so consistently featured in magazine romances and motion picture scenarios that we need not seek far afield for the source of this Cinderella motif. In a dream drama enacted in many American girls' hearts the hope of wealth and luxury springs eternal.
This attitude is a flareback to the highly commercialized marriage of all ancient history or an importation from Europe. It has slipped through the cordon of that protective moral tariff. Those acquainted with the literature of early Babylonia, cumbersomely recorded on Mesopotamian clay, may have reasons to doubt Herodotus's oft quoted reference to the bridal market where the unclaimed virgins were auctioned off to the highest bidder; but hundreds of marriage contract tablets in the early cuneiform leave no doubt that essentially matrimony involved a financial transaction. We read on a tablet from the first Babylonian dynasty, about 2,000 B. C:
"Zanikbiashu-Shamash, the son of Shamash-re'u, has taken ... Titum-ummi, the daughter of Shamash-Nasir, from Shamash-Nasir and (Beltum-Nagish) his wife, in marriage. He will pay ten shekels of silver to Shamash-Nasir, her father, as the bridal price. They have sworn by Shamash, Marduk, ... and Sin-muballit, the king, before [these] witnesses."
This form of marriage was perpetuated for centuries. In effect many brides were married to the highest bidder. A writer complains of his eighteenth-century England: "Our marriages are made, just like other common bargains and sales, by the mere consideration of interest or gain, without any of love or esteem." Nor has this stigma been entirely removed from England since his day. Asking, "What sort of husband can an American girl with, say, about $30,000 a year marry in Europe today?" the Milwaukee Journal (October 22, 1930) answers: "Anything. Literally anything. It is merely a question of what sort of life she desires.... Today there are lamentably few English girls with $30,000 a year, but any number of really decent eligible Englishmen with fortunes battered by the war and labor government, taxation, and the recent death duties. The marriage need not necessarily be wholly mercenary. It is merely an aristocratic maxim that money must come into a family every other generation."
With less éclat the conventional marriage of France and the Standesehe of Germany still lead ambitious parents to arrange marriages for financial convenience and direct their sons and daughters to stifle the impulse of their heart when their head calculatingly asks for matrimonial alliances distinguished by francs or marks.
A saner attitude has voiced its protest in our country. Occasionally we read of déclassé young women using the spring-board of publicity to dive into public attention by offering themselves in marriage to any one who will make a prenuptial settlement of, say, $5,000, allegedly for the benefit of an unemployed father or an incurable mother; but this notorious grasping for money is found only in a questionable fringe representing the subscribers to the professional marriage bureaus, where almost every letter stresses an expected inheritance, a bank deposit, a 160-acre farm, or other attractive assets. Clean-thinking young people, however, have learned to regard money as a secondary consideration. A questionnaire, answered by about 5,000 Lutheran young men and women in various sections of the United States, asking for the specifications of "an ideal helpmate" revealed that of the young men who answered, only 5 per cent made any reference to the desirability of marrying a wife with a large income. On the other hand, most of the answers submitted by the girls asked for "a moderate income" or "an adequate salary." Some set their requirements higher and wanted "enough money to live comfortably" or stated that "he must own his home" or "that he must have a substantial bank account." Only 5 1/2 per cent demanded that their future husband be "a man of means."
This emphatic "thumbs down" on large dowries and bulging bank books as the supremely desirable quality strikes a sympathetic response in the hearts of those who believe in love for love's sake. Most of us feel the thrill of loyalty which distinguished a twenty-six-year-old Philadelphian. He married the young lady of his choice, although he thereby forfeited $180,000 which an abstemious uncle had bequeathed to him on the condition that he remain unmarried until his thirty-fifth birthday. "What's $180,000 compared with the girl you love?" he asked inquiring reporters. The voice of true devotion answers: "Nothing, absolutely nothing!" We pay similar tribute to a Cleveland girl who announced her intention to spurn a fortune of $175,000 which she was to inherit when she married a designated young man. She persisted in her choice, however, and made the straightforward declaration: "I am in love with a young man in Cleveland, and all the money in the world doesn't tempt me."
The Christian protest against this attitude is based upon the obvious lesson of life that the desire for money, merely for its own sake, is always dangerous. A basic truth both of human experience and of Scriptural revelation warns us: "They that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition" (1 Tim. 6:9). If wealth were the key to happiness, we would be entitled to search for the sublimest earthly felicity in the lives of the wealthiest. Those who believe that the road to contentment is paved with gold should read the confession of this modern Croesus, an anonymous multimillionaire, who admitted in a popular magazine: "The most disillusioned men I know are those millionaires who dreamed there was a connection between ability to buy and desire to have and, on waking, found that the power to satisfy appetite destroyed it. . . . Here am I, for instance, only a shade over fifty years of age, wondering how I can make tomorrow different from yesterday. I have been what is called a multimillionaire since the war and have acquired the full set of precious or expensive things my kind collects — villas in Palm Beach and Aiken, shooting lodges where the game flies free, a town house in New York, one of those ornate mansions on the Sound, an apartment on the Champs Elysees, a parterre box in the Metropolitan, many of Duveen's old masters and Baumgarten's period furniture, together with automobiles, motor-boats, and other paraphernalia of great wealth. Add to these assets a well-mannered, presentable wife, two girls and a boy who sowed their wild oats without discommoding me, and you have the picture of this narrator, blessed with every recognized appurtenance of happiness — and bored to death."
In his biography of Frank D. Munsey entitled Forty Years — Forty Millions, George Britt quotes the multimillionaire publisher as saying: "Now my life — I feel that in some ways it has been a failure. I'll give you three reasons. I have no heirs. I am disappointed in my friendships. And I have no clear views on the great religious problems. The idea of marriage, I have come to believe, is to produce an heir to represent you, to step into your shoes after you are gone. I have no heir to represent me. When I was a young man, the girls I proposed to wouldn't have me; they thought I was too poor and never would be able to support them properly. Today I have forty million dollars; but what has it brought me? Not happiness. Where can I leave it?" Even with .his forty millions Mr. Munsey did not have the true meaning of the happiness of marriage.
Other plutocrats have been woefully poor in the things that make life worth while. William N. Wood, president of the American Woolen Company, received a yearly salary of more than $1,000,000; yet he committed suicide on his baronial Daytona, Florida, estate. It is not long since Miss Ella Wendell, last of her family, died, leaving an immense fortune estimated at more than $100,000,000. Surely, one might conclude, the mistress of this fabulous estate would have been supremely and securely happy. But here is the picture the New York. Tribune draws of Miss Wendell in her $10,000,000 home on Fifth Avenue: "At nightfall, when the Avenue was gay with lights and motor cars, but no flicker of light came from the somber mansion at Thirty-ninth Street, Miss Ella would steal out with Tobey (a poodle) through the side door and walk sedately in the garden, her wide black skirts fluttering over her old-fashioned button boots, her thin, yellow fingers clutching his leash.... There was no telephone in the house, and the doors were never opened when the bell was rung. The blinds were constantly drawn, and dust lay thick in the window chinks. Electric light, modern plumbing, the radio, and the gramophone were innovations that the Wendells ignored."
In studied protest against the deteriorating influences of money, Dr. W. W. Mayo chose as the scene of his medical practice not one of the large cities of our country, but Rochester, Minnesota, believing that, as Nazareth was big enough for the Great Healer, this hamlet, free from social distraction, would be large enough for him. His ideals of service were perpetuated by his two internationally renowned sons, Dr. William J. and Charles H. Mayo. When their surgical skill was rewarded by enticing financial returns, they refused to keep this wealth but established in 1915 the Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research at the University of Minnesota. Since that time more than 2,000 young students have received fellowships and financial aid from the endowment. The two physicians were moved by a recognition of the destructive influences of luxury and unearned money; and in the spirit of humanitarian service they laid down these principles: "It seemed to us that moneys which accumulate over and above the amount necessary for our families would interfere seriously with the object we had in view. Money is so likely to encourage waste of time, changing the objectives of life, living under conditions which put one out of touch with those who have been lifelong friends, perhaps less fortunate in material things'. How many families have we seen ruined by money, which has taken away from the younger members the desire to labor and achieve and has introduced elements into their lives whereby, instead of becoming useful citizens, they have become wasteful and sometimes profligate."
Particularly in marriage does financial overemphasis show its ugly consequences. To convince oneself that the wealthiest people, far from being the most happily married, are often the most unfortunate, one need but investigate the divorce lists of the nation. The frequency with which the names of the rich are found in the register of the legally separated is beyond all proportion.
In marriages of great financial disparity, money questions often act as a boomerang. The young woman, dazzled by the glitter of gold, may later, in moments of irate disturbance, be accused of marrying only for money; just as the self-confident but financially restricted young man who makes the mistake of entering a dollar-sign marriage with an heiress may find that he has not only sold his self-respect and his masculine independence but has also dropped in public estimation into the class of the fortune-hunter.
The truth of the Scriptural estimate "Riches are not forever" (Prov. 27:24) has been indelibly impressed upon this generation by the financial debacle that began in October, 1929, and that within three years provoked the closing of 5,000 banks and a loss of $72,000,000,000 in the value of the securities listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
However, some assets remain unaffected by depressions. Cultural and intellectual acquirements, for example, do not fluctuate with bull and bear markets. The young woman who, casting about for quick money, permits her choice to fall on an officer in an investment company in preference, say, to a struggling assistant at a small college, overlooks the fact that the college course, of which the incipient broker may be quite innocent, normally has a cash value in ultimate earning capacity. Entirely aside from his contributions of culture the university man with average application should eventually be the better provider over a period of years.
Spiritual resources, intangible and beyond computation as they are, should be accorded first consideration. By no miracle of social or financial alchemy can a girl reared under Christian influences and pledged to the Christian faith find any lasting happiness in a marriage even to millions that requires the compromise or the denial of her faith. Retinues of servants, a fleet of Rolls-Royces, a wardrobe of fur wraps, a king's ransom in jewels, easy entree into the inner circle of elite society, cannot silence the insistent voice of conscience nor utterly dissipate the vision of a Savior sold, Judas-like, for gold. Conversely, in any marriage where Christian faith is accorded its rightful priority there is a power for good beyond the purchase price of accumulated wealth, — a divine insurance against the matrimonial shipwreck suffered by those who set sail without the heavenly Pilot and with no other goal than a life of luxury and self-indulgence.
It was my pleasure to assist at an interesting wedding at which the groom was one of our young American businessmen, the bride a native of Australia. They had met under unusual circumstances on the Queen Mary; before the voyage was over, their acquaintance had developed into friendship and, during the succeeding weeks, into love. When the hopeful aspirant declared himself for the young lady's hand, he had to put his petition in a letter addressed to the bride-to-be's father in Sydney. Now, this Australian parent had never seen the young man who was to be his son-in-law, and with 12,000 miles of land and sea separating them, there was no time and facility for personal interview. So he wrote a series of letters which showed an exemplary consideration and interest. Particularly meaningful, after the discussion of morality, health, and religion, was the father's question: "Are you in a position to support a wife in suitable comfort?" By way of explanation he wrote: "I do not place great store upon riches; I prefer a simple mode of life. Happily I have been privileged to afford my family a comfortable home and all the little amenities of life, such as a maid to do the housework, suitable attire, amusements, and a car to run about in. Now, I do not expect a young man to start in where I have left off, but it is important that a young girl should be comfortably situated. I appreciate the fact that you are quite frank as to your present earnings, which in our money would be — pounds a week. This is modest enough and will mean going along very quietly, as a man must live within his means, have enough for his wants and a little to spare. Do your future prospects entitle you to anticipate increased earning power from time to time?"
In the same homely, every day wisdom of inspired truth the master of Old Testament proverbs assures us: "Better is a dry morsel and quietness therewith than an house full of sacrifices with strife" (Prov.l7:l). "Better is little with the fear of the Lord than great treasure and trouble therewith. Better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a stalled ox and hatred therewith" (Prov. 15:16, 17). How remarkably experience has corroborated this better way! To marry at a reasonable minimum; to enjoy the cooperative effort of striving; to see the seeds of thrift blossom forth into the full flower of a happy home, — this has been the experience of uncounted young couples who have been satisfied with humble, sometimes even arduous, beginnings. The early struggles have welded them much more closely together than any effortless career could have done. They appreciate by personal understanding the deeper, sturdier qualities which, if they are not emphasized by sacrifices, may never find occasion for full expression and become atrophied. Appreciation comes through the effort of acquisition. The wife who knows what money means and can measure the effort which it represents will think twice before she spends a single dollar unnecessarily; but the wife who has been pampered by indulgent parents can neither rightly estimate the moderate earning of her financially less favored husband nor ordinarily make the intricacies of the restricted family budget balance. She misses the thrill of pioneer partnership, which believes in present sacrifice for future happiness.
When the Golden Rule Foundation selected Mrs. Carl R. Gray of Omaha, Nebraska, as the "American Mother of 1937," this choice met with wide and enthusiastic endorsement. She would, so she is quoted, "include in the bill of rights of every child the privilege of Christian parentage, to be born of a Christian father and a Christian mother, who, knowing the will of God and living it, would thus create together a Christian home, a home dominated and enriched by human love, a sure and safe harbor of peace and joy." Definite Christian principles have guided her from her childhood; and her Christian zeal is shown by the fact that for many years she has taught Sunday school lessons both in her church in Omaha and over the radio. Modern young people, however, will be interested in the fact that she married Carl R. Gray (who later became president of the Union Pacific Railroad) when she was seventeen years old, and he was only two years her senior. To her young husband, then employed as a telegraph operator, she said that, though she had full confidence that one day he would be a railroad president, her deepest ambition for him was to help give him "the happiest home in the world." And on their wedding day their total assets and combined resources were less than five dollars!
This advice should not be misinterpreted as a sweeping denunciation of every marriage in which either the bride or the groom has more. No other rules of life are subject to as many exceptions and qualifications as the broad principles of marriage; and where love is ready to bear and to share, there the impediment of divergent financial rating, as dangerous as it may be, can be overcome.
Neither does the Church advocate indifference to the stark realities of finances. While the importance of money in marriage should not be overestimated, a protest must be voiced against the plunging headlong into the responsibilities of matrimony with inadequate resources or even with heavy debts. The idea that two will live as cheaply as one can be realized only by a domestic miracle. The Iowa Old Age Assistance Commission has discovered that at best two can live as cheaply as only 1.7. Pew spectacles in matrimonial experiences are more disillusionizing than these hasty, carefree unions that soon send a destitute couple back to the parental roof, to the pawnshop door, or to the community funds. The awakening to the hard reality of life is tragic testimony to the folly of financial imprudence.
Vice-Chancellor Francis B. Davis of the New Jersey Circuit Court sums up the warning of his judiciary experience in the epigrammatic "Don't risk wrecking happiness by marrying on insufficient income." (Philadelphia Public Bulletin, August 25, 1932.)
In St. Louis, Circuit Judge Wilson A. Taylor, reviewing more than a quarter of a century's activities on the bench as arbiter in divorce proceedings, reflects (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 18, 1933): "There's no hard and fast rule for a happy marriage. But I think there are two essentials — true love and the ability of the husband to provide a living income.... Often the young wife who gave up her position when she got married finds her husband's earnings won't go far enough. Then quarrels begin, and they often are the storm signals which lead to permanent discord."
When the inevitable question arises: "How much must we have before we can marry?" it is difficult to propose a schedule of salaries and savings accounts which can be regarded as a safe minimum. A few years ago a Western bank strongly counseled its employees not to marry until their annual income reached $1,500. Today married couples can find happiness on a markedly lower basis. But the minimum should be large enough to provide not only for bare existence but also for emergencies, the growth of the family, cultural and recreational advantages, participation in the work of the Church, and a financial reserve. If a girl is not sure that a young man can provide her with this minimum, she should hesitate before accepting him. That decision can be postponed until, either with the addition of her earnings or through improved employment prospects, a more adequate financial basis may be secured or safely anticipated. While the proverbial exit of love through the window upon the entrance of poverty may be a libel on the unbroken devotion of Christians, who are ready to share sickness, sorrow, and poverty without the diminution of their affection, nevertheless destitution and privation, when the result of improvident premarital planning, often serve as domestic dynamite.
Financial requirements must not, however, be raised to forbidding heights. The girl who insists that she will not marry until her husband is able to provide the comfort she enjoys at home and who starts the scale of her demands on the level of parental luxury may rob herself of some of the strongest character building experiences in life, the thrill of struggle, acquisition, and accomplishment. The young couple that sets itself a goal of savings which can be reached only by the employment of the wife, the postponement of childbirth, and the restriction of home development may find that it has worshiped too long at the golden calf to enjoy happiness in the fine art of living together.
Financial wisdom must be shown in the days of courtship. Albert W. Beaven, who investigated these pre-marriage finances, reports in the Young People's Leader: "My inquiries developed some rather startling figures on the cost to the average young man of his friendship with girls. One young man estimated that it was not possible for him to take a girl out and get back home for less than two dollars and forty cents an evening, and if it were a formal affair, the cost might run from ten to fifteen dollars. If he went with a girl and did not take her to the formal things that came in her set, he was looked upon as cheap. And yet he said: ‘I do not earn over twenty-five dollars a week, and the girl knows it.'"
Prof. Ernest R. Groves of the University of North Carolina, in his recent Marriage (a volume designed to be a college text-book on matrimony), discusses the courtship cost on the basis of data supplied by men and women of several universities. In his chapter on the "Problems of Courtship" he lists the expenses of one Vassar girl who reported the following outlay in preparation for a special evening's entertainment: Train fare, $12.00; taxis and tips, $2.00; meal on train, $1.75; shampoo, wave, manicure, $5.00; evening dress, $195.00; evening wrap, $275.00; slippers, $37.00; stockings, $4.50; gloves, $6.50; bag, $20.00; telegrams and telephone, 75 cts. Total, $559.50. Excellent fuel for communist fires!
More modest are the figures of a student at the University of North Carolina, who budgets his courtship expenses as follows: About two shows a week, $1.60; gasoline a week, about $2.00; drug-store treats a week, 50 cts.; occasional trip (once every two months), $10.00 to $25.00; occasional play or athletic event, $5.00 to $6.00.
Estimates of this sort appear quite absurd in the light of the present financial conditions. The vast majority of young people in college or out of college have no funds of these proportions at their disposal. This year Federal Aid was extended to 87,866 students, with a maximum allowance of $15 a month for the undergraduate or $30 for the graduate student. Officials at the University of Nebraska, who made a cross-section study of student finances for the school-year of 1932—33, found that 45 per cent of all men and 25 per cent of all women students were either wholly or partly self-supporting. A 1936 University of Wisconsin report touching upon student finances states that almost 60 per cent of the 9,000 young people enrolled at Madison are wholly or partly earning their way through the four years of their educational program. Even the few college men and women able to raise sums like those revealed in Professor Grove's findings often sacrifice the finest part of courtship happiness under the artificiality of this lavish outlay.
Never before have financial matters played such a large role in the marriage of young people as in the last decade.
Two million young people, we are told, want to get married, but cannot afford to. One of these young men complains to a statistician: "I belong to a lost generation. When I was graduated from college in 1930, I couldn't find a job. I haven't got one yet. There doesn't seem to be any place for me. In ordinary times I ought to be well on the way to a successful career, building a home and rearing a family. But here I am at loose ends. I am in love. I want to get married. But how can I? My father at my age was married and had two children." (American Magazine, June, 1934, p. 92.) And soon afterwards a young woman brings the parallel lament: "I have been knocking around, trying to find the work for which I am really fitted, ever since my graduation, three years ago. I was trained to be a research assistant, but the only work I have been able to get has been an elementary clerical job in an office and later as saleswoman in a large department store. Now I am on a PWA white-collar job, and I am glad to have it. Father is out of work, and my small pay helps the family. I have a nice fiancé, but I cannot possibly marry under these conditions." (L. c.)
In some instances discretion may dictate marriage with a simple ceremony, a modest flat, and a minimum of outlay for household equipment. Under other circumstances it may be in place to advise young people to find a temporary expedient in living under the same roof with their parents, although this must always be regarded as an emergency measure. Again, the best counsel will often point to the heroic course of foregoing the happiness of marriage until conditions offer a definite improvement. The last course is the most difficult and places a tremendous hardship upon the youth of our day, one to which their parents were not subjected.
According to a survey by the National Resources Commission (October, 1938), which analyzed the incomes of 21,419,000 families in the United States, "14 per cent of all families received less than $500 during the years studied; 42 per cent received less than $1,000, 65 per cent less than $1,500, and 87 per cent less than $2,500." Above this $2,500 figure, the report continues, "there were about 10 per cent with incomes up to $5,000, about 2 per cent receiving between $5,000 and $10,000, and only 1 per cent with incomes of $10,000 and more." The unequal distribution of wealth is further emphasized by the claim that the 42 per cent of the families (almost one half) whose income is below $1,000 annually receive less than 16 per cent of the total American family income, while the 3 per cent in the brackets of $5,000 or more receive 21 per cent of the total. Even more graphic is the assertion that the 1 per cent of the families with annual incomes of $10,000 or more enjoys 13 per cent of our total family incomes. Perhaps the most disheartening aspect of all is the revelation that the lower third of the nation's families had an average annual net income of only $471 during the year of 1935—1936. Seventy per cent of this group were not on the Federal relief rolls!
Fundamentally objectionable, from whatever angle it is viewed, is the secret marriage. In combating economic obstacles, it happens with increasing frequency that shortsighted, selfish young people elope to a near-by marriage market, pay a grasping justice of the peace an extra fee to insure secrecy, and then return to their separate homes as man and wife. This arrangement permits the wife to maintain her employment in concerns where married women are eliminated; it obviates the necessity of any expenditure for household equipment and makes the marriage a definite fact. But opposed to these benefits are these serious and decisive objections:
Run-away, secret marriage is a desecration of a holy relationship, an insult to the Christian pastor, and a heedless disregard of the parents. The secrecy which this relationship imposes is dishonorable, since it creates false impressions, and uncomfortable, since it necessitates the concealment of a fact which young people normally are proud and eager to publish. Its suppressed, clandestine character will ultimately work hardship and produce disillusionment. The secret ceremony, in plain terms, is a misrepresentation, a public deceit, and a thoroughly unfair and unfortunate beginning.
Few deceptions are worse; but the border-line of the most generous morality is ruthlessly transgressed in John Hyde Preston's "Love among the Ruins" (Harper's Magazine, July, 1934), where he states that in consequence of financial stringency young people who cannot find the means for marriage are casting all thoughts of right and wrong to the heedless winds and living together without the wedding ceremony. The moral outlook of this author has dropped so low that he can extol these without-the-law relationships for "their sincerity and willingness to struggle."
Amid these glaring concessions to a loose spirit of our age the Christian survey of life offers hope and strength of character to young people who find themselves torn between the desire for marriage and the difficulty of money matters. These Christian standards never permit of compromise with any unworthy proposals. They never countenance the end-justifies-the-means policy, but they are always emphatic in their confidence of God's effectual help. Trusting in Heaven's guidance, young people may be obliged to wait for the fulfillment of their marriage dreams; but if they are loyal in the profession of their faith, they can rest with the conviction that in God's time and by His direction they will be brought together for a lifelong, joy filled union.