And step by step, as economic evolution progresses, as vested wealth becomes more firmly established and claims for itself a larger and larger share of the total product of society--so step by step you find the pecuniary ideals becoming more firmly established, you find marriage becoming more and more a matter of property, and less and less a matter of love. In European countries there may still be some love marriages among the poor, but in the upper classes there is no longer any pretense of such a thing, and if you spoke of it you would be considered absurd. In countries of fresh and naive commercialism, like America, the women select the men because of their money prestige; but in Germany, the process has gone a step further--the men are so firmly established in their class positions that they insist upon being bought with a fortune. The same is true when titled foreigners condescend to visit our "land of the dollar." They will stoop to a vulgar American wife only in case her parents will make a direct settlement of a fortune upon the husband, and then they take her back home, and find their escape from boredom in the highly cultivated mistresses of their own land. Everywhere on the Continent, and in Great Britain also, it is accepted that marriages are matters of business, and only incidentally and very slightly of affection. The initiative is commonly taken, not by the young people, but by the heads of the families. Preliminary protocols are exchanged, and then the family solicitors sit down and bargain over the matter. If they were making a deal for a carload of hams, they would be governed by the market price of hams at the moment, also by the reputation of that particular brand of ham; and similarly, in the case of marriage, they are governed by the prestige of the family names, and the market price of husbands prevailing. Always the man exacts a cash settlement, and in Catholic countries he becomes the outright owner of all the property of his wife, thus reducing her completely to the status of a chattel. If any young couple dares to break through these laws of their class, the whole class unites to trample them down. One of the greatest of English novelists, George Meredith, wrote his greatest novel, "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel," to show how, under the most favorable circumstances, the union of a ruling class youth with a farmer's daughter could result in nothing but shipwreck.