The last "statement," it is reasonable to hope, has been made in the
Beecher-Tilton case previous to the trial at law, and it is safe to
say that it has left the public mind in as unsettled a state as ever
before. People do not know what to believe, but they do not want to
hear any more newspaper discussion by the principal actors. We are
not going to attempt any analysis or summing-up of the case at
present. It will be time enough to do that after the _dramatis
personae_ have undergone an examination in court, but we would again
warn our readers against looking for any decisive result from the
legal trial. The expectations on this point which some of the
newspapers and a good many lawyers are encouraging are in the
highest degree extravagant. The truth is that only a very small
portion of the stuff contained in the various "statements" can,
under the rules of evidence, be laid before the jury--not, we
venture to assert, more than would fill half a newspaper column in
all. What _will_ be laid before the jury is, in the main, "questions
of veracity" between three or four persons whose credit is already
greatly shaken, or, in other words, the very kind of questions on
which juries are most likely to disagree, even when the jurymen are
entirely unprejudiced. In the present case they are sure to be
prejudiced, and are sure to be governed, consciously or
unconsciously, in reaching their conclusions by agencies wholly
foreign to the matter in hand, and are thus very likely to disagree.
There are very few men whose opinions about Mr. Beecher's guilt or
innocence are not influenced by their own religious and political
beliefs, or by their social antecedents or surroundings. A curious
and somewhat instructive illustration of the way in which a man's
fate in such cases as this may be affected by considerations having
no sort of relation to the facts, is afforded by the attitude of the
Western press toward the chief actors in the present scandal. It may
be said, roughly, that while the press east of the Alleghanies has
inclined in Beecher's favor, the newspapers west of them have gone
somewhat savagely and persistently against him, and have treated
Tilton as a martyr. The cause of such a divergence of views,
considering that both Tilton and Beecher are Eastern men, is of
course somewhat obscure, but we have no doubt that it is due to a
vague feeling prevalent in the West that Tilton's cause is the
democratic one--that is, the cause of the poor, friendless man
against the rich and successful one--a feeling somewhat like that
which in England enlisted the working-classes in London on the side
of the Tichborne claimant, in defiance of all reason and evidence,
as a poor devil fighting a hard battle with the high and mighty. One
of the reporters of a Western paper which has made important
contributions to the literature of the scandal, recently accounted
for his support of Tilton by declaring that in standing by him he
was "fighting the battle of the Bohemians against Capital." Another
Western paper, in analyzing the causes of the position taken by the
leading New York papers on Beecher's side, ascribed it to the social
relations of the editors with him, believing that they met him
frequently at dinners and breakfasts, and found him a jovial
companion. All this would be laughable enough if it did not show the
amount of covert peril--peril against which no precautions can be
taken--to which every prominent man's character is exposed. The
moment he gets into a scrape of any kind he finds a host of persons
whose enmity he never suspected clamoring to have him thrown to the
beasts "on general grounds"--that is, in virtue of certain tests
adopted by themselves, judged by which, apart from the facts of any
particular accusation, a man of his kind is unquestionably a bad
fellow. The accusation, in short, furnishes the occasion for
destroying him, not necessarily the reason for it.
In Europe there are already abundant signs that the scandal will be
considered a symptomatic phenomenon--that is, a phenomenon
illustrative of the moral condition of American society generally;
for it must not be overlooked that, putting aside altogether the
question of Beecher's guilt or innocence, the "statements" furnish
sociological revelations of a most singular and instructive kind.
The witnesses, in telling their story, although their minds are
wholly occupied with the proof or disproof of certain propositions,
describe ways of living, standards of right and wrong, traits of
manners, codes of propriety, religious and social ideas, which,
taken together, form social pictures of great interest and value.
Now, if these were really pictures of American society in general,
as some European observers are disposed to conclude, we do not
hesitate to say that the prospects of the Anglo-Saxon race on this
continent would be somewhat gloomy. But we believe we only express
the sentiment of all parts of the country when we say that the state
of things in Brooklyn revealed by the charges and countercharges has
filled the best part of the American people with nearly as much
amazement as if an unknown tribe worshipping strange gods had been
suddenly discovered on Brooklyn Heights. In fact, the actors in the
scandal have the air of persons who are living, not _more majorum_,
by rules with which they are familiar, but like half-civilized
people who have got hold of a code which they do not understand, and
the phrases of which they use without being able to adapt their
conduct to it.
We have not space at our command to illustrate this as fully as we
could wish, even if the patience of our readers would permit of it,
but we can perhaps illustrate sufficiently within a very short
compass. We have already spoken of the Oriental extravagance of the
language used in the scandal, which might pass in Persia or Central
Arabia, where wild hyperbole is permitted by the genius of the
language, and where people are accustomed to it in conversation,
understand it perfectly, and make unconscious allowance for it.
Displayed here in the United States, in a mercantile community, and
in a tongue characterized by directness and simplicity, it makes the
actors almost entirely incomprehensible to people outside their own
set, as is shown by the attempts made to explain and understand the
letters in the case. Most of the critics, both the friendly and
hostile, are compelled to treat them as written in a sort of dialect
which has to be read with the aid of commentary, glosses, and
parallels, and accompanied, like the study of Homer or the Reg-Veda,
by a careful examination of the surroundings of the writers, the
conditions of their birth and education, the usages of the circle in
which they live, and the social and religious influences by which
they have been moulded, and so on. Their almost entire want of any
sense of necessary connection between facts and written statements
has been strikingly revealed by Moulton's production of various
drafts or outlines of cards, reports, and letters which the actors
proposed from time to time to get up and publish for the purpose of
settling their troubles and warding off exposure by imposing on the
public. No savages could have acted with a more simple-minded
unconsciousness of truth. Moulton, according to his own story,
helped Beecher to publish a lying card; got Tilton to procure from
his wife a lying letter; and Tilton concocted a lying report for the
committee, in which he made them express the highest admiration for
himself, his adulterous wife, and her paramour. Here we have a bit
of the machinery of high civilization--a committee, with its
investigation and report, used, or attempted to be used, with just
the kind of savage directness with which a Bongo would use it, when
once he came to understand it, and found he could make it serve some
end, and with just as little reference to the moral aspect of the
transaction.
Take, again, Tilton's account of the motives which governed him in
his treatment of his wife and of Beecher. He is evidently aware that
there are two codes regulating a man's conduct under such
circumstances--one the Christian code and the other the conventional
code of honor, or, as he calls it, "club-house morality"; but it
soon became clear that he had no distinct conception of their
difference. Having been brought up under the Christian code, and
taught, doubtless, to regard the term "gentleman" as a name for a
heartless epicurean, he started off by forgiving both Beecher and
his wife, or, as the lawyers say, condoning their offence; and he
speaks scornfully of the religious ignorance of the committee in
assuming in their report that there was any offence for which a
Christian was not bound to accept an apology as a sufficient
atonement. The club-house code would, however, have prescribed the
infliction of vengeance on Beecher by exposing him. Accordingly,
Tilton mixes the two codes up in the most absurd way. Having, as a
Christian, forgiven Beecher, he began, thirty days after the
discovery of the offence, to expose him as a "gentleman," and kept
forgiving and exposing him continuously through the whole four
years, the _éclat_ of such a relation to Beecher having evidently an
irresistible temptation for him. Finally, when Dr. Bacon called him
a "dog," he threw aside the Christian __rôle_ altogether and began
assailing his enemy with truly heathen virulence and vigor. A more
curious blending of two conceptions of duty is not often seen, and
it was doubtless due to the fact that no system of training or
culture had made any impression on the man or gone more than skin
deep. His interview with Beecher, too, by appointment, at his own
house, for the purpose of ascertaining by a comparison of dates and
reference to his wife's diary the probable paternity of her youngest
child, which he describes with the utmost simplicity, is, we venture
to say, an incident absolutely without precedent, and one which may
safely be pronounced foreign to our civilization. Whether it really
occurred, or Tilton invented it, it makes him a problem in social
philosophy of considerable interest.
Moulton's story, too, furnishes several puzzles of the same kind.
That an English-speaking Protestant married couple in easy
circumstances and of fair education, and belonging to a religious
circle, should not only be aware that their pastor was a libertine
and should be keeping it a secret for him, but should make his
adulteries the subject of conversation with him in the family
circle, is hardly capable of explanation by reference to any known
and acknowledged tendency of our society. But perhaps the most
striking thing in Moulton's _rôle_ is that while he appears on the
scene as a gentleman or "man of the world," who does for honor's
sake what the other actors do from fear of God, his whole course is
a kind of caricature of what a gentleman under like circumstances
would really do. For instance, he accepts Beecher's confidence,
which may have been unavoidable, and betrays it by telling various
people, from time to time, of the several incidents of Beecher's
trouble, which is something of which a weak or loose-tongued
person--vain of the task in which he was engaged, as it seemed to
him, _i.e._, of keeping the peace between two great men--might
readily be guilty. But he tells the public of it in perfect
unconsciousness that there was anything discreditable in it, as he
does of his participation in the writing of lying letters and cards,
and his passing money over from the adulterer to pacify the injured
husband. In fact, he carries, according to his own account, his
services to Beecher to a point at which it is very difficult to
distinguish them from those of a pander, maintaining at the same
time relations of the most disgusting confidence with Mrs. Tilton.
Finally, too, when greatly perplexed as to his course, he goes
publicly and with _éclat_ for advice to a lawyer, with whom no
gentleman, in the proper sense of the term, could maintain intimate
personal relation or safely consult on a question of honor. The
moral insensibility shown in his visit to General Butler is one of
the strange parts of the affairs.
We have, of course, only indicated in the briefest way some of the
things which may be regarded as symptomatic of strange mental and
moral conditions in the circle in which the affair has occurred. The
explanation of them in any way that would generally be considered
satisfactory would be a difficult task. The influences which bring
about a certain state of manners at any given time or place are
always numerous and generally obscure, but we think something of
this sort may be safely offered in consideration of the late "goings
on" in Brooklyn.
In the first place, the newspapers and other cheap periodicals, and
the lyceum lectures and small colleges, have diffused through the
community a kind of smattering of all sorts of knowledge, a taste for
reading and for "art"--that is, a desire to see and own pictures--
which, taken together, pass with a large body of slenderly equipped
persons as "culture," and give them an unprecedented self-confidence
in dealing with all the problems of life, and raise them in their
own minds to a plane on which they see nothing higher, greater,
or better than themselves. Now, culture, in the only correct and
safe sense of the term, is the result of a process of discipline,
both mental and moral. It is not a thing that can be picked up,
or that can be got by doing what one pleases. It cannot be acquired
by desultory reading, for instance, or travelling in Europe. It
comes of the protracted exercise of the faculties for given ends,
under restraints of some kind, whether imposed by one's self or
other people. In fact, it might not improperly be called the art of
doing easily what you don't like to do. It is the breaking-in of the
powers to the service of the will; and a man who has got it is not
simply a person who knows a good deal, for he may know very little,
but a man who has obtained an accurate estimate of his own capacity,
and of that of his fellows and predecessors, who is aware of the
nature and extent of his relations to the world about him, and who is
at the same time capable of using his powers to the best advantage.
In short, the man of culture is the man who has formed his ideals
through labor and self-denial. To be real, therefore, culture ought
to affect a man's whole character and not merely store his memory
with facts. Let us add, too, that it may be got in various ways,
through home influences as well as through schools or colleges;
through living in a highly organized society, making imperious
demands on one's time and faculties, as well as through the
restraints of a severe course of study. A good deal of it was
obtained from the old Calvinistic theology, against which, in the
days of its predominance, the most bumptious youth hit his head at
an early period of his career, and was reduced to thoughtfulness and
self-examination, and forced to walk in ways that were not always to
his liking.
If all this be true, the mischievous effects of the pseudo-culture
of which we have spoken above may be readily estimated. A society of
ignoramuses who know they are ignoramuses might lead a tolerably
happy and useful existence, but a society of ignoramuses each of
whom thinks he is a Solon would be an approach to Bedlam let loose,
and something analogous to this may really be seen to-day in some
parts of this country. A large body of persons has arisen, under the
influence of the common schools, magazines, newspapers, and the
rapid acquisition of wealth, who are not only engaged in enjoying
themselves after their fashion, but who firmly believe that they
have reached, in the matter of social, mental, and moral culture,
all that is attainable or desirable by anybody, and who, therefore,
tackle all the problems of the day--men's, women's, and children's
rights and duties, marriage, education, suffrage, life, death, and
immortality--with supreme indifference to what anybody else thinks
or has ever thought, and have their own trumpery prophets,
prophetesses, heroes and heroines, poets, orators, scholars and
philosophers, whom they worship with a kind of barbaric fervor. The
result is a kind of mental and moral chaos, in which many of the
fundamental rules of living, which have been worked out painfully by
thousands of years of bitter human experience, seem in imminent risk
of disappearing totally.
Now, if we said that a specimen of this society had been unearthed
in Brooklyn by the recent exposures, we should, doubtless to many
people, seem to say a very hard thing, and yet this, with the
allowances and reservations which have of course to be made for all
attempts to describe anything so vague and fleeting as a social
state, is what we do mean to say. That Mr. Beecher's preaching,
falling on such a mass of disorder, should not have had a more
purifying and organizing effect, is due, we think, to the absence
from it of anything in the smallest degree disciplinary, either in
the shape of systematic theology, with its tests and standards, or
of a social code, with its pains and penalties. What he has most
encouraged, if we may judge by some of the fruits, is vague
aspiration and lachrymose sensibility. The ability to dare and do,
the readiness to ask one's due which comes of readiness to render
their due to others, the profound consciousness of the need of sound
habits to brace and fortify morals, which are the only true
foundation and support of a healthy civilization, are things which
he either has not preached or which his preaching has only stifled.
"THE SHORT-HAIRS" AND "THE SWALLOW-TAILS"
There is a story afloat that Mr. John Morrissey made his appearance,
one day during the past week, in Madison Square, in full evening
dress, including white gloves and cravat, and bearing a French
dictionary under his arm, and that, being questioned by his friends
as to the object of this display, he replied that he was going to
see Major Wickham and ask him for an office in the only costume in
which such an application would have a chance of success. In other
words, he was acting what over in Brooklyn would be called "an
allegory," and which was intended to expose in a severe and telling
way the Mayor's gross partiality, in the use of his patronage, for
the well-dressed and well-educated members of society--a partiality
which Mr. Morrissey and his party consider not only unfair but
ridiculous. This demonstration, too, was one of the few indications
which have as yet met the public eye of a very real division of the
Democratic party in this city into two sets of politicians, known
familiarly as "Short-Hairs" and "Swallow-Tails"--the former
comprising the rank and file of the voters and the latter "the
property-owners and substantial men," who are endeavoring to make
Tammany an instrument of reform and to manage the city in the
interest of the taxpayers. Mayor Wickham belongs, it is said, to the
latter class, and has given, it seems, in the eyes of the former,
some proofs of a desire to reserve responsible offices for persons
of some pretensions to gentility, and exhibited some disfavor for
the selections of the "workers" in the various wards.
But we do not undertake to describe with accuracy the origin or
nature of the split; all we know is that the Short-Hairs are
disgusted, and that their hostility to the Swallow-Tails is very
bitter, and that when Mr. Morrissey proclaimed, in the manner we
have described, that a man needed to wear evening dress and to know
French in order to get a place, he gave feeble expression to the
rage of the masses. They have, too, concocted an arrangement which
embodies their idea of a well-administered government, and which
consists in compelling the departments to spend in wages in each
district at least $1.50 for each Democratic vote cast, and to
apportion the appropriations with strict reference to this rule, the
money, of course, to go to the nominees of Democratic politicians.
The plan departs from that of the French national workshops in that
it discriminates between laborers, but in other respects it has all
the characteristics of well-developed Communism. The way to meet it,
according to our venerable contemporary, the _Evening Post_, is to
have the taxpayers point out to the voters who are to receive the
money that they (the taxpayers) cannot well spare it, that they need
it for their own use, and that this mode of administering corporate
funds is condemned by all the leading writers on government. The
Swallow-Tails know so well, however, with what howls of mingled
mirth and indignation the Short-Hairs would receive such suggestions
that they never make them, but content themselves with confining the
distribution of the money to the members of their own division
quietly and unostentatiously, as far as lies in their power, which,
we candidly confess, we do not think is very far.
It would be doing the Short-Hairs injustice, however, if we allowed
the reader to remain under the impression that the unwillingness to
have the Swallow-Tails monopolize or even have a share of the office
was peculiar to them, or that John Morrissey's protest would be
unintelligible anywhere out of New York. On the contrary, when he
started out with his French dictionary he was giving expression to
a feeling which is to be found in greater or less intensity in
every State in the Union. The great division of politicians into
Short-Hairs and Swallow-Tails is not confined to this city. It is
found in every city in the country in which there is much diversity
of condition among the inhabitants. Nor did Morrissey mean simply
to protest against training as a qualification for the work of
administration, as the _Tribune_ assumed in a sharp and incisive
lecture which it read him the other day. We doubt if any pugilist in
his secret heart despises training. He knows how much depends on it,
and as he is not apt to possess much discriminating power, he is not
likely to mark off any particular class of work as not needing it.
What the Short-Hairs dislike in the Swallow-Tails is the feeling of
personal superiority which they imagine them to entertain, and which
they think finds a certain expression in careful dressing and in the
possession of certain accomplishments. In fact, the Swallow-Tails
whom the New York rough detests and would like to keep out of
public life, belong to the class known in Massachusetts as the
"White-cravat-and-daily-bath gentlemen," and which is there just as
unpopular as here, and has even greater difficulty in getting office
there than here.
The line of division in New York is, however, drawn much lower down.
The Massachusetts Short-Hair is a man of intelligence, of some
education, who wears a plain black négligé and rumpled shirt-front
and soft hat, and disregards the condition of his nails, and takes a
warm bath occasionally. The New Yorker, on the other hand, wears
such clothes as he can get, and only bathes in the hot weather and
off the public wharf. If he has good luck and makes money, either in
the public service or otherwise, he displays it not in any richness
in his toilet or in greater care of his person, but in the splendor
of his jewels. One of his first purchases is a diamond-pin, which he
sticks in his shirt-front, but he never sees any connection of an
aesthetic kind between the linen and the pin, and will wear the
latter in a very dirty shirt-front as cheerfully as in a clean
one--in fact, more cheerfully, as he has a vague feeling that by
showing it he atones for or excuses the condition of the linen. In
fact, the Short-Hair view of dress would be found on examination to
be, in nearly ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, something of this
kind: that the constant care of the person which produces an
impression of neatness and appropriateness, and makes a man look
"genteel," is the expression of a certain state of mind; that a man
would not take so much trouble to make himself look different from
the ordinary run of people whom he meets, unless he thought himself
in some way superior to them, or, in other words, thought himself a
"gentleman" and them common fellows, and that he therefore fairly
deserves the hatred of those of whom he thus openly parades his
contempt.
A New York Short-Hair seldom goes farther than this in his
speculations, though he doubtless has also a vague idea that a
well-dressed man is not so likely to stand by his friends in politics
as a more careless one. In New England, as might be expected, however,
the popular dislike of that "culte de la personne," as some Frenchman
has called it, which distinguishes "the white-cravat-and-daily-bath
gentleman," has provided itself with a moral basis. There is there a
strong presumption that the Swallow-Tail is a frivolous person,
who bestows on his tailoring, and his linen, and his bathing, and his
manners the time and attention which the Short-Hair or "plain blunt
man" reserves for reflection on the graver concerns of life, and
especially on the elevation of his fellow-men, and this presumption
even a career of philanthropy and the composition of the "Principia"
would not in many minds suffice to overthrow. We believe it is
authentic that General Grant never got over the impression produced
on him by seeing that Mr. Motley parted his hair in the middle, and
it is said--and if not true is not unlikely,--that Mr. R. H. Dana's
practice of wearing kid gloves told heavily against him in his
memorable contest with Butler in the Essex district. We may all
remember, too, the gigantic efforts made by Mr. Sumner and others in
Congress to have our representatives abroad prohibited from wearing
court-dress. What dress they wore was of course, _per se_, a matter
of no consequence, provided it was not immodest. The fervor on the
subject was due to the deeply rooted feeling that even the amount
of care for externals exhibited in putting on an embroidered coat
or knee-breeches indicated a light-mindedness against the very
appearance of which the minister of a republic ought to guard
carefully. It is partly to produce the effect of seriousness of
purpose, but mainly to avoid the appearance of airs of social or
mental superiority, that nearly all skilful politicians dress with
elaborate negligence. In most country districts no complaints can
be made of men in office such as the New York Short-Hair makes
against the Swallow-Tail. They fling on their easy-fitting black
clothes in a way that leaves them their whole time for the study
of public affairs and attention to the wants of their constituents,
and at the same time recalls their humble beginnings.
What strikes one, however, as most curious in the controversy
between the Short-Hairs and the Swallow-Tails is the illustration it
affords of the rigidity with which every class or grade in
civilization treats its own social conventions, whatever they may
be, as final, and as having some subtle but necessary connection
with morals. When the Indian squats round the tribal pot in his
breech-clout, and eats his dinner with his dirty paw, he is fully
satisfied that he is as well equipped, both as regards dress and
manners, not only as a man need be, but as a man ought to be. The
toilet, the chamber, and the dinner-table of a plain New England
farmer he treats as wasteful and ridiculous excess, and if good for
anything, good only for plunder. The farmer, on the other hand,
loathes the Indian and his ways, and thinks him a filthy beast, and
that he (the farmer) has reached the limits of the proper as regards
clothes and food and personal habits, and that the city man who puts
greater elaboration into his life is a fribble, who is to be pitied,
if not despised and distrusted. In short, we can hardly go one step
into the controversy without coming on the old question, What are
luxuries and what necessities? and, as usual, the majority decides
it in the manner that best suits itself. It may be said without
exaggeration that the progress of civilization has consisted largely
in the raising of what is called "the standard of living," or, in
other words, the multiplication of the things deemed necessary for
personal comfort, and, as this raising of the standard has always
been begun by the few, the many have always fought against it as a
sign of selfishness or affectation until they themselves were able
to adopt it.
The history of the bath furnishes a curious though tolerably
familiar illustration of this. The practice of bathing disappeared
from Western Europe with the fall of the Roman Empire. The
barbarians were themselves dirty fellows, like the Indians, and
their descendants remained dirty in spite of the growth of
civilization among them, putting their money, like the Short-Hair,
mainly into jewels and other ornaments. As long as linen was scarce
and dear, changes were, of course, seldom made, and the odor of even
"the best society" was so insupportable that perfumes had to be
lavishly used to overcome it. The increased cheapness of linen and
more recently of cotton, and the increased facilities for bathing,
have in our own day made personal cleanliness a common virtue; but
an occasional bath is still as much as is thought, through the
greater part of the world, compatible with moral earnestness and
high aims. Of late, indeed within the memory of the present
generation, persons mainly belonging to the wealthier class in
England have boldly begun to bathe every day, and they have finally
succeeded in establishing the rule that a gentleman is bound to
bathe, or "tub," as they call it, every day, and that the usage
cannot be persistently neglected without loss of position. Indeed,
there are few social casuists in England who would decide, without
great hesitation and anxiety, that any English-speaking man was a
gentleman who did not take a daily bath. That this view of the
matter should be accepted by the great body of those who would
rather not bathe every day is not to be expected, nor is it to be
wondered at that they should consider it offensive, and that the
practice of sponging one's self in cold water every morning should
in caucuses be looked on as a disqualification for political life.
There is, of course, a necessary and provoking, though tacit,
assumption of superiority in the display of greater cleanliness than
other people show, just as there is in coming into a room and
finding fault with the closeness of the air in which other people
are sitting comfortably. It is tantamount to saying that what is
good enough for them is not good enough for you, and they always
either openly or secretly resent it.
The popular distrust of the practice of wearing white cravats in the
evening may be traced to the same causes. The savage makes no change
of toilet for the evening. He dresses for war and religious
ceremonies, but he goes to a social reunion or feast in such clothes
as he happens to have on when the invitation finds him. The plain
man of civilized life, under similar circumstances, puts on a clean
shirt and his best suit of clothes. This suit, among the European
peasantry, is apt to be of simply the same cut and material as the
working suit, or, as it would be called in Brooklyn, "the garb of
toil." Among Americans, it is a black suit, like that of a
clergyman, and includes a silk cravat, generally black, but
permissibly colored. The whole matter is, however, one of pure
convention. Now, it has been found of late years a matter of
convenience, and of great convenience especially to hard-worked men
and men of moderate means who are exposed to the constant social
demands of the great cities of the world, to have a costume in which
one can appear on any festive occasion, great or small, which all,
gentle or simple, are alike expected to wear, which is neither rich
nor gaudy, and in which every man may feel sure that he is properly
dressed; and the dress fixed on for this purpose now throughout the
civilized world is the plain suit of black, with the swallow-tailed
coat, commonly called "evening dress."
Nothing can be simpler or less pretentious, or more democratic.
Nobody can add anything to it or take anything away from it. Many
attempts to modify it have been made during the last thirty years by
leaders of fashion, and they have all failed, because it meets one
of the great wants of human nature. It is only within the last
fifteen years that it has obtained a firm foothold in American
cities. People looked on it with suspicion, as a sign of some inward
and spiritual naughtiness, and regarded the frock-coat with its full
skirts as the only garment in which a serious-minded man, with a
proper sense of his origin and destiny, and correct feelings about
popular government, could make his appearance in a lady's parlor.
Why, nobody could tell, for there was a time, not very far back,
when the frock-coat was itself an innovation. Of late--that is,
within, perhaps, twenty years--the Swallow-Tails of the world have
exchanged the black or colored for a white cravat, and justify
themselves by saying that it not only looks cleaner, but is cleaner
of necessity than a silk one, and that you cannot look too clean or
fresh about your throat when you present yourself in a lady's house
on a festive occasion. Nevertheless, the plain, blunt men are not
satisfied. They do not as yet feel sure as to its meaning. They
think it indicates either over-thoughtfulness about trifles or else
a leaning, slight though it be, toward despotism and free-trade.
They will now all, or nearly all, wear evening dress with a black
cravat, but even those of them who will consent to put on a white
one do so with a certain shamefacedness and sense of backsliding,
and of treachery to some good cause, though they do not exactly know
which.