Litchfield enquirer., 1875-05-27
Letters. Kissing, and the scandal,

ness that seem to prevail in the City o
 Churches. Yet sentiment is the wine o
 life-'dangerous and intoxicating, no doubt
 when drunk to excess-and kissing, within
 due limitations, may not bealtogether un
 profitable, either. Brooklyn sentimental
 ism is itself reaction. It isn't alway
 safe to believe all we read of Puritanism
 and very likely no sea captain was eve
 fined by the authorities of New Haven fol
 kissing his wife on return from lone
 voyage one Sabbath day. Still they were
 certainly a little hard on sentiment. II
 dissenting from this as well as from other.
 of the stern tenets of our New England
 fathers, Plymouth Church has no doubt
 done wisely, as well as kindly; but. iudg
 ing from the example of her pastor, that
 reaction has been carried to perilous ex
 treme.
 Letter-writing is to be great sufferer.
 Men already loathe written sentiment and sheer at the honest expression of a proper affection, and we fear the correspondence of generation of letter-writers is to be left complete Desert of Sahara with hardly an oasis of natural sentiment. The half of the world that believe Mir. Hilton a much injured husband, and the other half that believe Mrs. Hilton a much wronged wife, each read with disgust the 1orxy oAaot;o,ako 1otto-. &hoG ,oo,,o5 lDo
 tween that remarkable pair; and they are CONSCIOUS of sinking of heart as they contemplate the utter emptiness of at least half those effusive demonstrations. The fear of Tiltonism has already struck mil lions of affectionate words from millions of letters of affectionate husbands and wives, during the past half year. Indeed among the evilest effects of this evilest of scandals, we reckon almost the worst to be the hardness of feeling and manner it will aggravate in a people already the least affectionate in word and manner of any ot the great civilized peoples of our globe.
 Kissing is also suffering from the same evil associations, and is likely to fall un- der the same ban. After the dark ages of Puritanism this art is having an unlovely Renaissance ih Brooklyn, and New Eng land and the Tribune are crying for 8 bridling of manners in this regard; though. here, as in the case of sentimen- talism generally, it is but fair to remem- Der that it takes more than one Beecher, or one Hilton, to make Brooklyn.
 With the kisses of Love it is not for us to deal. They come within the domain of poetry, and the Litchfield Enquirer ab- stains from poetry to an extent that has drawn down much probably just criticism upon us. But with the kissing customs that prevail between men and women not lovers. the mere prose of journalism may, perhaps, venture to deal.
 We have a strong suspicion that it is man rather than woman that has enacted the various social statutes regarding ''pro- miscuous" kissing (We use the term in it's technical sense as it appears in ecclesi. astical indictments for the offense of ''pro- miscuous" dancing the dancing of men and women together). It is bus mess not much to the taste of the average Perhaps there is calm enjoy ment in the ninety out of hundred of her kisses that she gives her own sex; but, of the remaining ten in hundred that go to mans share, nine are robbed by assurance or yielded to constraint of custom where one is graciously bestowed on the consid- erateness of real affection. Whenever the business of kissing goes to extremes it is always owing to some undue power or in- fuence of man. We could never believe that any true woman could in her heart like the uncouth Copenhagens and other games invented by uncultured men for the torture of uncultured women. They are the children of barbarism that made of woman only higher species of game, hunted by a race whose pleas ures as we'll as whose serious pursuits were all brutal, ,-men to whom woman's beauty of person was everything; her in- finitely finer beauty of her soul, little or nothing.
 Just as rude societies debase their wo- men to the level of their own low tastes, so rude individuals, exalted by birth or position, have often and again lowered the women of their acquaintance. by rude. fa- mtliarities such as would not be allowed other men. The kings and princes of monarchical Europe did much worse, as the history of the royal houses even of moral England most terribly proves. In our own country men of commanding po- sitions, like Henry Ward Beecher, some times claim exemption from the usual rules of society. My older readers will recollect how the ladies of the old Whig party used to rush to kiss Henry Clay; and Mir. Beecher seems to be to the ladies of Plymouth church very much what Hen- ry Clay was to the ladies of all Whig America. Now the great men who do these things are, we submit, taking advan- tage of their high position to turn women out of the ways that are good and natural to them into ways that are bad and unnat- ural to them. Weaker and worse men venture to disregard the rules of society, thus broken, and then the world is shocked at what it calls prevalent demoralization. This form of petty tyranny over woman's ways is not confined to the greatest men and the greatest places. Every hamlet is liable to have it's petty..tyrant who takes his liberties with the women of his pre-. cinct, and they submit to them with more
 or less dislike, because it is >''his way.
 He is probably an estimable person who
 means no evil, yet he unconsciously shuts
 the hearts of the best women of his ac quaintance against him. while he become. the subject of iIl.prounded apvv and o