Men are as much the idolaters of fashion as women, but they sacrifice
on a different part of the altar. With men the fashion goes to cigars,
and club-rooms, and yachting parties, and wine suppers. In the United
States the men chew up and smoke one hundred millions of dollars'
worth of tobacco every year. That is their fashion. In London not
long ago a man died who started in life with $750,000; but he ate it
all up in gluttonies, sending his agents to all parts of the earth for
some rare delicacy for the palate, sometimes one plate of food costing
him three or four hundred dollars. He ate up his whole fortune, and
had only one guinea left. With that he bought a woodcock, and had it
dressed in the very best style, ate it, gave two hours for digestion,
then walked out on Westminster Bridge and threw himself into the
Thames and died, doing on a large scale what you and I have often seen
done on a small scale.
But men do not abstain from millinery and elaboration of skirt through
any superiority of simplicity. It is only because such appendages
would be a blockade to business. What would sashes and trains three
and a half yards long do in a stock market? And yet men are the
disciples of custom just as much as women. Some of them wear boots so
tight that they can hardly walk in the paths of righteousness, and
there are men who buy expensive suits of clothes and never pay for
them, and who go through the streets in great stripes of color, like
animated checkerboards. I say these things because I want to show you
that I am impartial in my discourse, and that both sexes, in the
language of the surrogate's office, "share and share alike."