tragedies in smallish American cities that began and ended in dress: women deprived of their all too infrequent intellectual and social delights, simply because they could not bring themselves to face an assembly in which other women whose authority their own taste could not acknowledge, knew their "best" dresses by heart.

I have said that the economic considerations are no concern of mine; nor are they. Yet it may not be amiss to suggest in this context that the women who are responsible for the almost unpaid toil of the slum-children over "willow" plumes are not the rich women who will give for their willow plumes any price that is asked of them. It is the harpy of the suburbs, the frequenter of bargain-counters and Monday morning "sales," the woman whose most instructive reading is done among the designs and patterns of the "women's" magazines, who is responsible. From what one reads, one is certainly compelled to infer that if these little children are to be saved, willow plumes should be put at prohibitive prices. "But since our women must walk gay," the aristocracy that is rooted in democracy can hardly do without its willow plumes. Fashion has got itself into a position of such importance as that. It is so terrible a thing to be unfashionable that the vast majority of women -and the vast majority of women are not rich

or anything like it-stretch every nerve to be in fashion. They miss, if they are not, too much that is legitimately theirs. The requirement is irrelevant, is absurd; but it is made. They will, therefore, pay what they can; but they cannot pay much. The logic is clear. They go to the great shops to demand their willow plumes, and their Irish-lace collars, in the very spirit which took the Dames de la Halle to Versailles. Hence many of the conditions of labor about which we read so many lurid articles. For demand creates supply.

The American woman of moderate income is alternately congratulated on her "smartness" and scolded for her extravagance. She cannot very well, as things stand, be smart without being extravagant. But the fact that chiefly gives one pause is this: that a woman cannot mingle comfortably with her equals unless she can clothe herself each season in a way that both to her and to them would have looked preposterous a twelvemonth before. It has luckily become, in the strictest sense, vulgar, to be endimanchée; but most people are by definition-vulgar; and I have known women, again, who stayed at home from church because they could not so clothe themselves. Not unadvisedly, I am tempted to say; for in one of the most famous churches of America, I have seen the shabbily dressed woman seated, by the usher, with reference solely to her cos

tume; and I have heard, too, the testimony of other women of her kind, turned into "stayat-homes" because precisely that thing they could not endure. An odd battle of pride with pride; and there are better uses to put pride to than that. More blatant and less grim is the authentic anecdote recently told me concerning a Newport "colonist." She and her daughter entered the church one Sunday morning, marvellously dressed in contrasting shades of red. "There will be no one else in our pew this morning," she murmured graciously to the usher; "put some one in with us, if you like— any one in white or black." What could not Dean Swift have done with that! One does not wish to make tragedy out of what is essentially comic. Yet it may fairly be said that comedy has its rough side, and that a comedy retold from the point of view of the comic character himself, would often make melancholy stuff. It would be possible, over this matter of fashion, to shed the bitter tears of the satirist.

It is odd that "dress reform" should always have meant something ugly. There would be so tremendous a chance for any one who wished to reform dress in the interest of beauty! But the most amused and disgusted of us will, very likely, forever shrink from the task. "The pilgrims were clothed with such kind of raiment as was diverse from the raiment of any that

traded in that fair. The people, therefore, of the fair made a great gazing upon them: some said they were fools, some they were bedlams, and some they were outlandish men." There are two reasons why we shall shrink from it: we should have to begin with ourselves; and we should certainly be called bedlams. But oh, the pity of it!

CAVIARE ON PRINCIPLE

NE can usually either begin or end with
Mr. Chesterton, though one can seldom

do both. "It is simpler to eat caviare on impulse than to eat grape-nuts on principle," he says, in one of his intervals of pure lucidity. I should like to make a Chestertonian transposition, and pronounce that it is better (I do not say simpler) to eat caviare on principle than to eat grape-nuts on impulse. The fact is that the modern fad of simplicity for its own sake has ceased to be merely ridiculous; it has become dangerous. May not some of us lift our voices against it?

I have no right, I suppose, to ally, in my own mind, socialists and vegetarians. But I nearly always find, when I ask a vegetarian if he is a socialist, or a socialist if he is a vegetarian, that the answer is in the affirmative. I am sure that they, on their side, confuse snobs with meat-eaters. One could forgive them, were they more bitterly logical. For my own part, I should be quite willing to go the length of all Hinduism and say that rice itself has a soul. I can even see myself joining a "movement" for giving the vote to violets and disfranchising orchids. This, however, is not their