ulate the expenditures of families. They
are made by women whose sole and only hold on life is personal
attractiveness, and with whom to keep this up, at any cost, is a
desperate necessity. No moral quality, no association of purity, truth,
modesty, self-denial, or family love, comes in to hallow the atmosphere
about them, and create a sphere of loveliness which brightens as mere
physical beauty fades. The ravages of time and dissipation must be made
up by an unceasing study of the arts of the toilet. Artists of all
sorts, moving in their train, rack all the stores of ancient and modern
art for the picturesque, the dazzling, the grotesque; and so, lest these
Circes of society should carry all before them, and enchant every
husband, brother, and lover, the staid and lawful Penelopes leave the
hearth and home to follow in their triumphal march and imitate their
arts. Thus it goes in France; and in England, virtuous and domestic
princesses and peeresses must take obediently what has been decreed by
their rulers in the _demi-monde_ of France; and we in America have
leaders of fashion, who make it their pride and glory to turn New York
into Paris, and to keep even step with everything that is going on
there. So the whole world of womankind is marching under the command of
these leaders. The love of dress and glitter and fashion is getting to
be a morbid, unhealthy epidemic, which really eats away the nobleness
and purity of women.

"In France, as Monsieur Dupin, Edmond About, and Michelet tell us, the
extravagant demands of love for dress lead women to contract debts
unknown to their husbands, and sign obligations which are paid by the
sacrifice of honor, and thus the purity of the family is continually
undermined. In England there is a voice of complaint, sounding from the
leading periodicals, that the extravagant demands of female fashion are
bringing distress into families, and making marriages impossible; and
something of the same sort seems to have begun here. We are across the
Atlantic, to be sure; but we feel the swirl and drift of the great
whirlpool; only, fortunately, we are far enough off to be able to see
whither things are tending, and to stop ourselves if we will.

"We have just come through a great struggle, in which our women have
borne an heroic part,--have shown themselves capable of any kind of
endurance and self-sacrifice; and now we are in that reconstructive
state which makes it of the greatest consequ