In later years love and marriage, difficult enough problems for anyone, have additional snares and pitfalls for the children of the rich. It is true that the rich man can marry the penniless girl to whom he is devoted, and the rich girl can accept the man who is struggling for a living. But the far more frequent occurrence is for the rich girl to be captured by the man who wants her money, and for the rich man to be entrapped by the ambitious mother who wants his wealth for her daughter. Not even experience teaches. Instances could be given of women who have married for money, and though every page of their life has taught them the folly of this irreparable step, yet they refuse to learn. They spend their later life in arranging marriages at all costs with rich men for their daughters, placing insurmountable obstacles in their way if they attempt marriages on moderate means, which must entail their dropping out from the ranks of the select. So it is that here again money, far from assisting, impedes and even stifles the natural preferences of human affections, and the average of unfortunate and disastrous unions is far higher among the rich than in any other class. Some people are apt to believe that the society scandals which afford so much material for newspaper reports and gossip give an unfair impression of the frequency of these disasters, which they maintain arise just as often in other classes of society, but are not as widely reported. This is not the case. In the middle and lower professional classes, where marriages have been contracted by parties free to exercise their natural choice and where lives are filled with work and occupation, scandals of this description are very rare. It is in the class where, as we have shown, the power to select is restricted and distorted, where life itself deteriorates into prolonged idleness and self-indulgence and the natural obligations of motherhood are disregarded and shirked, and it is also at the very bottom of the scale, where vice and degradation produced by want engender brutality, where, in fact, there is too much and where there is too little, in the scum and in the sediment, that married life becomes most frequently intolerable. A critic may now begin to insist that it is all very well to condemn the large servile establishments, futile luxuries, defective education, and foolish marriages as the outcome of riches, but that, taking them as a whole, the class that have the assured possession of wealth are superior in the refinements of mind and body to the lower classes, and that as you go higher in the scale of society the proportion of mental and physical excellence gradually increases.