ar at the most
fashionable of receptions. The gracious and self-sacrificing and womanly
women of our revolution, wore dresses cut lower than those of their
great-grand-daughters, as any portrait-gallery will show. The dress is
indefensible, but let us not be too ready to condemn the wearer for
worse sins than thoughtlessness and vanity.

One doubts if there is a single Becky Sharp the less, (poor Becky!)
since Thackeray gave such terrible immortality to their great prototype.
The satirist is not the reformer. The satirized do not see themselves in
the exaggerated type. They go their way, and thank God that they are not
as these others. The critic of the London SATURDAY, beginning, perhaps,
with the intention of telling sad and sober truth about a class, has
ended with a list of the follies and faults of individuals, and these
are set down with the keen and unconvincing clearness of the satirist.

It is a good thing indeed, that any aspect of the "woman question"
should claim place, week after week, in a leading English journal. It is
a good thing that it has been thought wise to reprint these essays here.
All this talk about the wrong ways of women suggests that there is a
right way, as yet very much involved in the dust of discussion and the
fogs of speculation. All these accusations against her folly imply a
proportionate tribute to her possible wisdom, if once she can get a fair
chance to be wise.

What the reviewer urges against the effect of fashionable life on the
intellect, cannot be gainsayed. But in America, at least, the injury to
the young men is greater apparently than to the young women. At any
evening party in New York, at any "Hop" in Newport or Saratoga, the
faces of the men are of a lower type, their talk is more inane, their
manners are more vulgar. The girls are empty enough, heaven knows! but
they seem capable of better things, most of them. And they are not so
wholly spoiled in character. I have found very fashionable girls capable
of large sacrifices for love, or kindred, or obedience to some divine
voice. This proves that they have only to be taught that there is
something better than being very fashionable, to take it thankfully. But
the men seemed sordid and selfish, and grown worldly-wise before their
time.

Yet it might make us both more just and more generous to remember that
during our time of peril as a nation, these very ranks of purposeless
men furnished us soldiers and money, and a c