of their rarity. The rule is that when a man of rank marries beneath him, it is usually some theatrical star, circus-rider or clever adventuress, known in all the watering-places and metropolitan drawing-rooms of Europe. Of the couple thus formed, the woman is an abnormal being, who has already given the world to understand that she does not conform to the average type of humanity, that she selected an exceptional, often eccentric and sometimes objectionable life-career from choice, that she tempted fate, and rebelled against the duties which modern society imposes upon its feminine members. The man is what psychiatry calls a "degenerate," that is, an individual in whom will and reason are decayed, the moral sense rudimentary and sexual passion alone, often in a strange state of degeneration, the main-spring of the inner life. Such persons are unable to resist the desire for the possession of a woman who knows how to awaken their love; in order to win her they commit follies, ignoble actions and even crimes, if nothing else will do. If we glance through the novels which close with the marriage of the prince and the actress, we will find almost without exception that the man is a "degenerate" in the technical sense, a weak, sensual and impulsive nature. The mesalliance therefore, as experience shows that it is usually contracted, is very far removed from being of any anthropological benefit to the aristocracy; on the contrary, it seems as if it were a fiendishly shrewd plan for uniting the very worst specimens of humanity in matrimony, to produce offspring morally diseased.
This is the origin of the patent nobility, and this is its necessarily consequent fate. The ancestor is an egotist, courtier and intriguer, probably all three combined, the descendant condemned to decay as if by a decree of destiny—either by the exhaustion of the family blood
