The Dawson news. (Dawson, Ga.) 1889-current, 1908-03-11


| Christmas and New Year festivities
that could leave upon a good girls
cheek a flush less innocent than the
| bright and wholesome color that
comes of out-of-doors, of harmless
gaiety and homely American fun.
! sThis New Years eve in New York
was a spectacle on which a decent
| girl could not bear to gaze without
feeling herself polluted.
The interchangeable carnival OF
| the streets, with its skylarking, its
raucous horns, it's impairment feath-
err ticklers-was hilarious enough;
yet it did not greatly overpass the
bounds of the harmless horseplay
which characteriZes the typical holt
day crowd. If it was hilarious it
was not ribald.
But in the thronged hotel res
taurants and in the notable and no.
tOrious restaurants that have no
hotel attached debauchery, plain and
undissembled, reigned from long be-
fore midnight until the very coming
of dawn. AS usual, wine came be-
fore the cigarettes; and as usual,
when the cigarettes did come, the
wine flowed in hurried quarts in
stead of temperate slipping. Mid
night and the shamed New Year
found a shocking heritage of the
year that was gone.
Women HelplessIy Drunk.
In every cafe, in every restaurant
in every public dining room the girls
and the women of New York were
abandoned to the embrace of the
saturnalia which began, couple of
hours earlier, with the glass of wine
slipped slowly in assumption of digni-
fed prOpriety and proceeded with
the next hour to the cigarette, light
ed amid the protesting laughter of
feigned ineXperience or the gravity
of unfeigned connoisseurship.
AS the night sped they degener-
ated into mere bacchanals, beauti-
full, wild with wine, the odor of their
cigarettes, acrid in the retiring rooms
where all the women were smoking,
sweeping out into the main apart
ments to ascend, pungently blue, and
join the mist that overhung the riot
GUS scene.
If wOman's mOdesty ever was lost
it went up in smoke and down in
wine on Broadway in New York dur
ing the early morning hours of the
years new day. The faces that
so vacuously, the cheeks that
flushed so furiously, the eyes that
flashed so brilliantly were not the
faces of soulful, human women;
were no longer the cheeks of mod
est or even decent girls; were far
from the eyes of sane or rational hui
man beings. They were the features
of those who had come down jubi-
lantly into animalism-tO the bes-
TALLY of the drunkard
And later as they reeled, helpless,
to the retiring rooms and tumbled
upon the floors, while their
clutched cigarette ends
burned smoldering holes in the silks
and laces of their splendid gowns all
semblance of beauty, of their human
ity, even of their bestiality departed.
They were simply SOdden heaps.
Modesty, morality. vestiges of SUI
perficial decency-they had vanished
in the early stages of the debauch.
They were New York's tribute to it's
deities of wine and cigarettes; of
luxury and fashion"
week, and a alderman found
the courage to introduce a local or
dinance filming and imprisoning res
taurant prOprietOrs who permit wo-
men to smoke in their establish
ments. The measure passed the
board of aldermen. but was vetoed
by the mayor on constitutional
grounds.
Without such laws, and independ-
emily of them, does there remain
among the leaders of society, on
whom the responsibility for the prac-
tice rests, a sufficient discretion and
a sufficient power to check it while
it rises to it's height?
And, failing these, is there the
grace of her own salvation in the
soul of the modern American girl;
or has it already passed up and away,
in the blue of the smoke from her
red curved liDS?