rawer cannot do anything
about it. It can only ask the prayers of all good people on Christmas Day
for the rich. As we said, we do not have them with us always--they are
here today, they are gone to Canada tomorrow. But this is, of course,
current facetiousness. The rich are as good as anybody else, according to
their lights, and if what is called society were as good and as kind to
itself as it is to the poor, it would be altogether enviable. We are not
of those who say that in this case, charity would cover a multitude of
sins, but a diffusion in society of the Christmas sentiment of goodwill
and kindliness to itself would tend to make universal the joy on the
return of this season.

SOCIAL CLEARING-HOUSE

The Drawer would like to emphasize the noble, self-sacrificing spirit of
American women. There are none like them in the world. They take up all
the burdens of artificial foreign usage, where social caste prevails, and
bear them with a heroism worthy of a worse cause. They indeed represent
these usages to be a burden almost intolerable, and yet they submit to
them with a grace and endurance all their own. Probably there is no
harder-worked person than a lady in the season, let us say in Washington,
where the etiquette of visiting is carried to a perfection that it does
not reach even in New York, Boston, or Philadelphia, and where woman's
effort to keep the social fabric together requires more expenditure of
intellect and of physical force than was needed to protect the capital in
its peril a quarter of a century ago. When this cruel war is over, the
monument to the women who perished in it will need to be higher than that
to the Father of his Country. Merely in the item of keeping an account of
the visits paid and due, a woman needs a bookkeeper. Only to know the
etiquette of how and when and to whom and in what order the visits are to
be paid is to be well educated in a matter that assumes the first
importance in her life. This is, however, only a detail of bookkeeping
and of memory; to pay and receive, or evade, these visits of ceremony is
a work which men can admire without the power to imitate; even on the
supposition that a woman has nothing else to do, it calls for our humble
gratitude and a recognition of the largeness of nature that can put aside
any duties to husband or children in devotion to the public welfare. The
futile round of society life while it lasts admits of no rival. It seems
as importa