The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1870-08-12
sPrRrT or TEE PRnss.
Editorial Opinions Of the Leading Journals
upon Current Topios-Compiied Every
Day for the Evening Telegraph.
FASHIONABLE MECHANICS.


fresh air and. food for both their cramped
bodies and minds. One of the largest and
most ptiable classes in England, he suggests,
is the decayed gentry, the ''genteel poverty
which starves and shrinks from the public
eye. The pinch of hunger, he alleges, ''un-
der faded silks and satins is sharpest" We
are then treated to pathetic picture limned
in darkest colors of these pdu0reS hoHteug-the
sons of penniless baronets and honorables
''driven to the city to become clerks, or the
daughters of clergymen sinking into seam
stresses or nursery governesses." We have
class in America which parallels these unfortu-
mates; one which, curiously enough, is as yet
uupainted among us by either poet or novelist
We have no .decayed gentry to occupy that
dreadful, doubtful Debatable Land in society,
where one walks on red-hot ploughshares, for
ever aping and mining dignities which are
not rightfully ours. We have too few ''good
old families" and are too prosperous people
to furnish class who have sunk to this level,
but we do provide countlesa aspirants who
have scrambled up to it-men and women
far more deserving of pity than the gentleman
or gentlewoman in their shabby clothes, who
are yet conscious of that strength or memory
within which passeth both show and the want
of it.
The shabby-genteel is melancholy spec
tacle enough, but the vulgar-genteel is sight
stead of laugh. Who does not know the
species in all its miserable pretentious variety
from the newcomer into Fifth avenue, with
her tawdry ormolu and brocade, to the boss
carpenters wife with her painted Brussels
end sleazy silk founces? Just now, at this
holiday noon of the year, this great factitious
sham element of American society thrusts
itself into notice most glaringly. 1t is the
matter of dress perhaps that is the most
.c u.
infected our society. We have not so much
fault to find with extravaganza or luxury in
outward garb of houses or persons when they
are confined to those who can afford them,
or who understand their uses. A beautiful
woman chastely and artistically dressed,
or a house which is a home, furnished
meaningly, serve the same aesthetic purpose
as a fine picture; and as to the
mere financial bearing of the matter, it is
better that Madame La Parvenue should
scatter her newly gained wealth from her
unable fingers among honest dressmakers
and upholsterers than that her son should
fling it away at the race course or faro table.
But what shall we say to Stubs, the worn
out, gray-haired book-keeper, half of whose
two thousand year go to provide his wife
and daughters with cheap false paniers, cheap
false chignons, and a cheap loud fortnight
at Saratoga-all modelled strictly after the
fashion of Madame? Or to Smith, the pea
nut man, whose wife, with chignon, panier,
etc., still cheaper, still tawdrier, haunts it
for q week in defiant imitation of the Stubbs?
Or of Dora the chambermaid and Polly the
cook, who go with their ''young gentlemen, 3"
glass jewelry hanging from their ears, hemp
twisted about their heads and the calves of
their legs stuffed with sawdust, to jostle and
parade with the best at Cape May? Madame
La Parvenue has cast into the treasury of
folly out of her abundance. but these poor
wretches have given all they had.
1t needs but an hours walk on the beach
or in the ballroom at any of our fashionable
places of resort to know how culture, home
comfort, education, all chances for higher or
more honorable lives, are being sacrificed by
a large class of our mechanics and working
men to the idol of sham Fashion, poor and
ludicrous imitation of the falsest of realities
The money which might give to the shop
keeper or smith sound domestic comfort,
and fit his children to rise surely and steadily,
is spent in making him and them objects of
ridicule and pity to the very people whom he
servilely initiates. His daughter in mock
satin and cotton lace draggles through the
sands at Long Branch dress whose design
and shape originally lent grace to a duchess
in her own drawing-room. Nor is it the
present outlay which is the sole evil; the mill
dew of decay rots not only the purse but the
moral sense. Calico or silk becomes at last
the problem of life to the girl, as hired hack
or thoroughbred does to her brother. The
whole frame of society from head to foot is
feverish, tainted with impure and worthless
desires.
Nor is it worth while to allege that the
fault lies in the wealthier classes, and that
the remedy must come from their reforma-
ton. Effective reforms in any people have
always begun in the lower strata, grown out OF
their need, worked upward to leaven the
mass. There is, perhaps, among the me
chanics and tradesmen of this country
larger amount of sound practical sense, if les
refinement or culture, than in the classes
they initiate. 1t is high time that this com
mon sense was put to work in their owl
home affairs as well as in the matters of poll
tics and trades unions. Let any one of them
look calmly at his own and his wife's way o
life, and determine whether a servile outsid
aping of others, and ignobly debased ambi
ZION as to the ends of life, about the famil
Aarth, will not surely corrupt in future tn
S"pgth and happiness of the country.
WHA THE EMPEROR NAPOLEON
Mluh STILL DO WITH ADVANTAGE.
From the Nv 1yqnss
iIe nIs' a great defeat of the French ha
Invol'eu ue Scrifce OF Ministry. rept
t,Ilon VI 're isaster may cost dynast,
Wnen Napoieon snterel upon the preseii
the @ penalty @ a Of fss better II than he tn,
throw of the empire. His bsterest 'n1 ana,s;, I've
in England plainly perceive,;n his onen;n
addresses to the nation and Gs armv au
dence Of his extreme detection. A tasI, w..
forced upon him by public opiniohwbicb !
seems to have felt it would be alike ,atsl 6,
him to accept or refuse The French laon
have long been eager to provoke a II