Year: 1873

force or an occasion for display; or both
combined. To prefer those who need, is
as far removed from the calculations Of
the host, as the "6re-party," imagined by
Punch No one who gives a party as It
is called, thinks Of the real pleasure or
good which II will be to the guests: only
whether it is ''well done" according to the
conventional standard-that Is, rejecting
honor on the giver. The arrangements Of
society are in themselves utterly barbarous,
while affecting to be specially civilized
One could imagine simple, generous, and
most delightful banquet, with music and
flowers, and plenty of space and freedom
of action--a banquet that did not include
three long hours of cramp and surfeit,
with an indigestion to follow, or a crowded
crush in sitting room where conversation
is impossible, and the music not worth
listening to. One could imagine arrange
ments more artistically lovely than now,
yet not more costly; welcome more
hearty, and with less parade. But our
civilization dooms us to table wherc one
side freezes and the other burns where
draughts chill the naked shoulders at one
end, and the heated air, loaded with un-
wholesome yapors, threatens apoplexy at
the other; to rooms wherein delicate wo-
men turn sick and faint for want of oxy-
gen, in fetid atmosphere used by two or
three hundred pair of lungs; it dooms US
to accept invitations given by people we
dislike, and to eat things that will disagree
with us, just as it dooms US to an artificial
manner, to Dn insincere smile, false
speech it dooms us to open our own house
to hundreds Of our fellow-creatures, not
halfa-dozen Of whom We care ever to see
again, just as it dooms US to the suppress
sion Of all emotion, of all earnest thought,
Of all honest words; and when we have
made ourselves the most like animated
dolls in manner, and put ourselves to the
most Inconvenience for things we detest,
and people we despise, in fact, then we
are considered Of the best breeding, and
the most perfected civilization. Half the
entertainments, too, are only possible
through screwing and pinching in things
more essential to the true dignity Of life
than the giving of dinner badly cooked,
and worse arranged, which no one who
eats really enjoys. Yet, if the food is
questionable, kid golyes are de riigueur /;
and you cut your stale fish with electro
plated knives and forks Of the covenanted
pattern. Honor to those who dare to offer
simple pleasures within their means Of
money and service, and who invite to their
house those whom it viii both delight and
benefit, not only those whom they say they
"must," by the queer law of social reci-
procity in boredom and pretence


Funeral pompand bridal finery are things
again which hold on to the very soul Of
society. The duty imposed on US to
impoverish the living that the dead may
be put into the ground with certain
etalage of nodding plumes, sleek horses,
and strange men, draped in floating black,
seems to some Of us inalienable to the
decency of civilization; to others remnants
of the barbaric emphasis with which savage
chiefs and braves conclude their lives. If
we held the theory that the ghosts of the
dead were soothed by our display, we
should then have some kind Of reason why,
more or less sound But we have not
even this to impel us; only the tyranny Of
custom. So we go on putting the poor
pale dead into coffins Of oak, bossed with
silver and lined with satin, dissipating the
bread Of the widow and children because
We are civilized, and show is greater
thing than substance In our marriages,
too, we beat our tomtoms, and summon
crowd to see girl dressed in white, with
orange blossoms made of kid and cambric
in her hair, assigned to the keeping Of a
man whom perhaps she does not love, and
who, on his part, may have repented of
his contract before the honeymoon is over.
Marriage being at the best but a lottery with
more blanks than prizes, it seems a little
unnecessary to call the world to take note
how the drawing is begun. Our bridal
finery of dress and feast too often proves
to be no better than the Hindu widows
"brayery" when she comes to perform
suttee; and say what we viii there is GER
tain sacri6cial look about it, decking and
tressing as of a victim, which is one of the
sharpest satires against the institution we
profess to honor. If we consider, too, the
character Of many of our marriages, we
do not find anything in them so admirable
that we need ask heaven aad earth to wit
ness their fulfllment. Women sold for
a settlement, and men selling themselves
for Fortune; the scrofulous mated with
the insane, and neither the mental nor the
moral development of the family taken in
to account as basis Of calculation for the
future; disease and miserable skulls perpet-
uated for private gain, as If the nobler
peopling Of the world was nobody's care,
and its ignoble nobody's sin: frankly, is
this civilization We hang man who
has killed another, but we suffer men and
women to murder the future Of society at
their pleasure. We object to the reckless
dissemination Of smallpox say, by selfish
ness and want Of consideration for others,
but when il comes to the pepetuation of
hereditary disease by marriage, then we
are powerless, and have not even public
nDiniOn M n raafrnininr noa,t