Waterbury evening Democrat., 1892-04-01
A REvoLT or FAsHloN.

Not So Apt to salnnm Toward the East
 as We Used to Be.
 Americans have always been more or less victimized by subservience to the arbitrary dictates of fashion that continually makes salaam toward the east, toward Europe and the ''old world" countries While this habit of mind is still characteristic to us as a people, it is encouraging to note that in one particular a revolt has begun. We refer to the conventional European tour. For many years, because it was sanctioned by fashion, it was supposed by a great many persons to be the most pleasnrable and instructive of possible trips beyond their immediate native borders. Most heroically, therefore, they braved the material dangers and the ennui of an Atlantic voyage, and spent months on the worn thorough fares of Europe. in the wake of hun dred of thousands that had taken pre- cisely the same excursion under pre- cisely similar auspices, with precisely the same mistaken notion that they were making the most profitable ex- penditure of their time and money. He who ventured to assert that there could 
 country beauties and wonders excelling those of foreign lands, atmospheres and environments more romantic and more suggestive than any known in the other hemisphere, was looked upon as an ec. centric and a possible enemy to the public veal. People were enslaved by the same rules that still prescribe the cut of their garments and the dimen sions of their visite. Fashion ordered them over sea, and over sea they hastened
 But in spite of prejudice the plain truth has made it's way. Our own coun- try, our own continent, is no whit be- hind the so-called ''old world'' in at tractiveness to the unbiased traveller. There are no charms of climate, scen- cry, bloom and fruitage over sea that California does not transcend in every particular. The odor of antiquity that clusters about the pyramids of Egypt hangs even more mysteriously over the colossal pyramids in Mexico. There are close at hand Alps and glaciers, deserts, volcanoes, canons, petrifactions of en- tire forests, hot mineral springs, cata- racts, ruins of prehistoric civilizations, prehistoric dwellings still resisting the leveling hand of time. There are abso- lute perfections of vegetation, of flow CTS and fruits, of landscape and of cline. Year by year we hear less of the old af- fected talk of European scenery. He who has ''been abroad" no longer inn agines that he wears an enviable halo. Multitudes who formerly thought it necessary to spend the winter in Italy or the south of France now repair to southern California They are abandon ing the old conventional routes for un- 'hackneyed delights of our own south west It is healthy revulsion. and one that should be encouraged by precept and example. It is difficult to imagine a more melancholy spectacle than an American wanderer through Europe who is ignorant of his own land Such snobbish representatives cast discredit upon this nation, and it is a satisfaction to note that they are yearly becoming fewer; and we can find a word of praise for fashion itself when we find it, as at present, strongly setting in direction approved by common sense, and point ing to a more valuable education and the increase of a just national pride Minneapolis Journal