THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
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have left, is to supply the ducats for the same. You know, Kate, that if you attend the fine literary association, of which you are a bright and particular star, I must meanwhile in my office earn enough to buy the paper and ink with which you write those essays which delight all readers. If you will bear with me, Katharina, 1 would like to tell you of two or three prominent faults of your sex which injure and restrict our rights as men. The most mischievous and glaring, and the most ruinous, is extravagance. I knew you would look aghast at this, and ask me for an account of the money I spend for tobacco, etc., but you should be charitable toward some of our habits, seeing that we do not interfere with yours.”
“ Bless me, Petruchio, what habits have w r e, I should like to know? ”
‘‘A multitude, Kate. I don’t know the half. Crochet work, embroidery, painting —tea is milder than tobacco, but your systems are more sensitive. Then there are powders, perfumes, eau-de-cologne, lavender, verbena, heliotrope, and what not, against all of which I have nothing to say, because their odors are nearly equal to that of a fine Havana cigar. I would be glad if this feminine love for color and fragrance w r as more common among men. But there are curious differences of taste. The peculiar fascination in smoking is not in the taste of the weed, but in the sight of the smoke. It is called the ear of corn which we hold out to induce into harmony the skittish thoughts which are running loose. I understand that knitting is the great feminine narcotic. You wall agree with me, Kate, that this habit is not very important in comparison with those vices of character. Is not the use of the weed less objectionable than those systematic habits of envy, avarice, hypocrisy, or the vice of extravagance? Wastefulness has almost become a trait of society. American women, especially, are profuse and lavish in money and dress, in equipage, in furniture, in houses, in entertainments. Perhaps the largeness, the immensity of our land’s resources and materials, as well as the wonderful national advance we have already made, tends to cultivate in our people a feeling of profusion and the habit of extravagant display. When fortunes do not arrive by magic, but must be built up painfully, slowdy, at the expense of the nerve and sinew, the brain and the heart of the builder, and when a close attention to money-making is rapidly becoming a national badge and is in danger of eating out entirely what is of infinitely more value than wealth, a high national integrity and conscience, and sinking the immaterial and the intellectual in the material and the sensual. It is, then, by you, the women of America, that the men shall have saved to them their rights. Great financial crisises in which colossal schemes burst like bubbles; commercial bankruptcies, in which honorable names are bandied on the lips of common rumor and w r hite reputations are blackened by public suspicion; minds that started in life with pure and honest principles, determined to win fortune by the straight path of rectitude, gradually growing distorted and ending by enthroning gold in the place made vacant by departed virtues; hearts that were once responsive to the fair and beautiful in life and in the universe, that were w r ont to thrill through and through at a noble deed or fine thought, now pulseless and hard as the nether millstone; souls that once believed in God, Heaven, and good, now worshiping commercial success and its exponent, money, and living and dying with their eager eyes fixed dustward. And yet, if this is to be checked, it must be begun in the home and by its guardian woman.
“Another thing, Kate, which you women do, and which I think defraud us of our rights, is your wild chase after, and copying of, European fashions, habits and styles of living. We are accused of being a nation of copyists, and it is more than half true. And why it should be I can not understand. I am thankful, as I look at this wonderful “Dream City,” that we are beginning to have an art and a literature our very own. Let us have the fashion, as well, which shall be distinctively American. Not what is sensible or becoming, but what is the fashion, does the American woman buy. Not what she can afford to purchase, but wdiat her neighbors have, is generally the criterion. The aping of aristocratic pretentions has been a much ridiculed weakness of Americans. It is certain that American society needs republicanizing in all its grades.