alize its sinfulness nor wholly appreciate its evils. But
its hollowness and falseness they feel at times most keenly. Else why
their perpetual unrest, their longing, dissatisfied condition of mind?
Oh, if we could pull off the false glitter that lays like a gorgeous
mantle over the fashionable world, we should see such an aching void,
such a palpitating heart of woe, as would make the very stones cry out
for sympathy. Look at a fashionable woman--one woman, a poor, weak
mortal, apprenticed to earth to learn the work of the skies, pupiled
here to be schooled in the great lessons of beauty and goodness written
on all the outward universe and taught by the constant voice of God in
the soul in its best experiences; see such a woman fretting herself
well-nigh to death in chasing the butterfly delusions of Fashion,
seeing them fade in her hands as fast as she grasps them, starving her
soul and dwarfing her mind in the pursuit of such phantoms, enfeebling
her body, irritating her nerves, breaking down her constitution, fading
in early womanhood, and dying ere her years are half lived; what object
is more sorrowful and has higher claims upon our pity? We think it sad
when a woman is thus crushed by neglect or abuse, by the hand of
poverty, by hard toil, or the harder fate of a consuming death at the
hands of a false or brutal companion. But really, why is it sadder than
to die by inches on the guillotine of Fashion? The results are the same
in either case. Abused women generally outlive fashionable ones. Crushed
and care-worn women see the pampered daughters of Fashion wither and die
around them, and wonder why death in kindness does not come to take them
away instead. The reason is plain: Fashion kills more women than toil
and sorrow. Obedience to Fashion is a greater transgression of the laws
of woman's nature, a greater injury to her physical and mental
constitution, than the hardships of poverty and neglect. The slave-woman
at her tasks will live and grow old and see two or three generations of
her mistresses fade and pass away. The washerwoman, with scarce a ray of
hope to cheer her in her toils, will live to see her fashionable sisters
all die around her. The kitchen-maid is hearty and strong, when her lady
has to be nursed like a sick baby. It is a sad truth, that
Fashion-pampered women are almost worthless for all the great ends of
human life. They have but little force of character; they have still
less power of moral w