There are clerks in stores and banks on limited salaries who in the
vain attempt to keep the wardrobe of their family as showy as other
folk's wardrobes are dying of muffs, and diamonds, and camel's-hair
shawls, and high hats, and they have nothing left except what they
give to cigars and wine suppers, and they die before their time, and
they will expect us ministers to preach about them as though they were
the victims of early piety; and after a high-class funeral, with
silver handles at the side of their coffin of extraordinary
brightness, it will be found out that the undertaker is cheated out of
his legitimate expenses! Do not send to me to preach the funeral
sermon of a man who dies like that. I would blurt out the whole truth,
and tell that he was strangled to death by his wife's ribbons! The
country is dressed to death.
You are not surprised to find that the putting up of one public
building in New York cost millions of dollars more than it ought to
have cost, when you find that the man who gave out the contracts paid
more than five thousand dollars for his daughter's wedding dress.
Cashmeres of a thousand dollars each are not rare on Broadway. It is
estimated that there are eight thousand women in these two cities who
have expended on their personal array two thousand dollars a year.
What are the men to do in order to keep up such home wardrobes?
Steal--that is the only respectable thing they can do! During the last
fifteen years there have been innumerable fine business men
shipwrecked on the wardrobe. The temptation comes in this way: a man
thinks more of his family than all the world outside, and if they
spend the evening in describing to him the superior wardrobe of the
family across the street that they cannot bear the sight of, the man
is thrown on his gallantry and his pride of family, and without
translating his feelings into plain language, he goes into extortion
and issuing of false stock and skillful penmanship in writing somebody
else's name at the foot of a promissory note; and they all go down
together--the husband to the prison, the wife to the sewing machine,
the children to be taken care of by those who were called poor
relations. Oh, for some new Shakespeare to arise and write