The Montgomery advertiser., 1906-01-28
|GLIMPsES OF THE SMART SET
Minority of Our Wealthy Citizens Included in the Smart SetA Re- cent Popular Novel Depicts the Smart Set Cruel and Corrupt The Picture Even 0verdrawn Points Warning America
 Must Heed Lesson or Suffer Fate of Greece and Rome

situation for her. Married women writing compromising letters to men whom they meet socially, who are SUD- posed to be friends of their husbands, and in one case the man who Is more nearly a gentleman than any other in the book, simply tears such letters In two and losses them into the waste basket. There is hardly. in the whole story, a character who could decentiy pass muster among ordinary men and women the two who are supposed to be patterns of goodness being singu- iarly destitute of hvmor and common sense.
 If the smart set be like this, so heart less, so corrupt, so cruel our conclu- sion is that it's career must be short There is far too much essential reality in America to endure very long that which Is wholly false and meretricious.
 We are fain to believe. however, that the picture is overdrawn. There must be behind tie silken portieres and vel vet hangings of these exquisite homes some who nave kept unharmed fairer ideal. All the young women who go to French dressmakers and wear gowns that cost a fortune are not like poor Lily Bart, who from babyhood had been taught that the only life worth
 
 1t were better to die and be done with it than to be out of the fashion. All the men who understand the ups and downs of finance and whose names are spells to conjure with in the mar ket, arc not sordid and mean and ra- paeious. Our Hebrew friends have a right to protest against their repre- sentative in these pages that profess to depict with truth the successful "a Az perch which seemed to him fitting goal for his ambition. Notwithstanding the melancholy muddle of 1t all. there must finger shreds of human kindness and commonplace goodness in the smart set.
 Yet the picture points a moral and indicates warning. It is like dam ger signal on the road. We, in Amer lea, are striding forward at tre- mendous pace. We are becoming nomadio; not contented with perma- hence and stability, with homes that gather to themselves the sweetness of fond associations and the glory of old traditions--we are becoming accus- toned to a migratory life.
 A man need not be a multi-milIionaire to own three or four homes and spend only a fraction of the year in any of them. Fami- lies, not of the smart set are too prone to disintegrate. The wife and daughters are not unwilling to let the ocean roll for months together between themselves. and the hard-working father. who is busy at home accommodating more millions, Young men too early allowed control of large sums grow irresponsible and wasteful and. aiast end by filling the grave of the drunkard or the suicide. All history combines to prove that too much luxury breeds corruption. tempts individuals to dishonesty, and men aces the very continuance of dominant people. That which happened in the dim past to Greece and Rome may happen to America in the twentieth century of the Christian era, if we shut our eyes to les sons that are given in the giimpses we have of the smart set.