Who then shall say that the reform of our system of observances is
unimportant? When we see how this system induces fashionable
extravagance, with its entailed bankruptcy and ruin--when we mark how
greatly it limits the amount of social intercourse among the less
wealthy classes--when we find that many who most need to be disciplined
by mixing with the refined are driven away by it, and led into dangerous
and often fatal courses--when we count up the many minor evils it
inflicts, the extra work which its costliness entails on all
professional and mercantile men, the damage to public taste in dress and
decoration by the setting up of its absurdities as standards for
imitation, the injury to health indicated in the faces of its devotees
at the close of the London season, the mortality of milliners and the
like, which its sudden exigencies yearly involve;--and when to all
these we add its fatal sin, that it blights, withers up, and kills that
high enjoyment it professedly ministers to--that enjoyment which is a
chief end of our hard struggling in life to obtain--shall we not
conclude that to reform our system of etiquette and fashion, is an aim
yielding to few in urgency?
There needs, then, a protestantism in social usages.
Pages:
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323