319

XXXIII.--COSTUME AND ITS MORALS, 329

XXXIV.--THE FADING FLOWER, 339

XXXV.--LA FEMME PASSEE, 347

XXXVI.--PRETTY PREACHERS, 355

XXXVII.--SPOILT WOMEN, 364

INTRODUCTION.

The "Woman Question" will not be put to silence. It demands an answer of
Western legislators. It besets college faculties. It pursues veteran
politicians to the fastnesses of so-called National Conventions. Under
the sacred sounding-boards of New England pulpits has its voice been
heard, and its unexpected ally, the London SATURDAY REVIEW, introduces
it to the good society of English drawing-rooms. That this introduction
comes in the form of diatribe and denunciation is a matter of the least
moment. Judgment will finally rest, not on the conclusions of the
special pleader, but on the strength of the case of the accused.

Something, clearly, is wrong with fashionable women. They accept the
thinnest gilt, the poorest pinchbeck, for gold. They care more for a
dreary social pre-eminence than for home and children. They find in
extravagance of living and a vulgar costliness of dress their only
expression of a vague desire for the beauty and elegance of life. Is
it, therefore, to be inferred that the race of noble women is dying out?
St. Paul was hardly less severe than the London SATURDAY, if less
explicit, in his condemnation of the fashionable women of his day, yet
we look upon that day as heroic. Certainly neither London nor New York
can rival the luxury of a rich Roman matron, yet it was not the luxury
of her women which destroyed the empire, and Brutus's Portia was quite
as truly a representative woman as the superb Messalina. John Knox
thought that things were as bad as they could possibly be when he
thundered at vice in high places; and if there had been a John Knox in
the court of Charles the Second, he would have sighed for a return of
the innocent days of his great-grandfather.

On the whole, that hope which springs eternal suggests that the
fashionable women of the reign of Victoria, and of our seventeenth
President, are not essentially more discouraging than all the
generations of the thoughtless fair who danced idly down forgotten
pasts. Nay, we may even hope that they are better. If they will not
actually think, yet the fatal contagion of the newspaper and the modern
novel comm