“A formidable array of evils, indeed; but still they do not dishearten me. As for money I do not look for it in a wife, because I should never feel independent if I was indebted to a bride for my bread. Besides an heiress is generally educated in such expensive habits that it requires a fortune to satisfy her luxurious wishes. As a mere matter of business this marrying for money is nine times out of ten a losing speculation. You are forced to live according to your wife’s former style, and being thus led into expenses which your income will not afford, you too often end by becoming bankrupt. Then, too late, you discover that your wife is fit only for a parlor; she becomes peevish, or wretched, or sick, and perhaps all together. Domestic felicity is at an end when this occurs—” “But her birth!” “A still more nonsensical objection. It is one of the prejudices of the old colonial times, and was imported from England by the servile adorers of rank, who came over the Atlantic to assume airs in the provinces which they dared not assume at home, and to sneer at the honester members of society, who, instead of being like themselves drones in the public hive, earned their bread fairly. It is this latter class to which our country is indebted for its subsequent prosperity—a prosperity which all the aristocrats of Europe could not have bestowed upon it. The revolution, while it made us politically equal, did not destroy this social aristocracy. The same exclusiveness prevails now as then, but with even more injustice, for it is opposed to the whole spirit of our republican institutions. Nor is this all: the prejudice itself is ridiculous. How can people, who scarcely know their own ancestors beyond one or two generations, and whose blood has been derived from every nation and occupation on the globe, talk with any propriety of birth? Why, there is scarcely a man or woman of our acquaintance, who is not an example of this pie-bald ancestry. Take, for instance, Walter Hastings, who, you know, boasts of his family. I happen to know all about him, for he is a second cousin to myself. His father made a fortune, and married into our family. But who was he? The son of a German redemptioner. Hastings’ mother, it is true, is the grand-daughter of an English baron, and the sister—a far higher glory—of a signer of our Declaration of Independence. Such is a fair sample of our best families. Why I would undertake to furnish from the ancestry of any of them either a peasant or a peer, either a laborer or a drone. Birth, forsooth! The only persons who boast of it in this country are generally those who have the least claim even to an honest parentage; and the noisiest pretender to blood I ever met with was the grandson of a fellow who was hung fifty years ago for forgery.”