ON THINGS IN GENERAL.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXIV, Issue 10410, 7 April 1897, Page 3

ON THINGS IN GENERAL.

MRS. WALLACE'S GOWN. Incidental reference was made a few days ago in the Herald to a fifty thousand dollar dress worn by a Mrs. Celia Wallace, of Chicago, and a picture of it, enclosing a very pretty woman, presumably Mrs. Wallace herself, appeared in the illustrated papers of New York. Reference was also made to the spiteful envy which such a pretty dress evoked, and the imprecations that were hurled at) her by Socialists and tho friends of the pore wurriken man bocause of such a cruel waste of wealth. I am prepared to take the side of Mrs. Wallace, and if she will let) me handle her pretty dress for a few minutes, I shall show that on the contrary she is one of the benefactresses of her race, and that) men and women, especially of the wurriken class, should rise up and call her blest.

THE REASON OF IT. Now Mrs. Wallace's ten thousand pounds, dress represents the realised profits.on pigsticking and pork-curing in Chicago, her husband, who expressed his affection for his pretty wife in this way, being an eminent and successful practitioner in that) particular class of industry. Now, that pretty dress stands for the profits of say ' forty thousand hogs. It is in this way. Five shillings per hog would probably be the net gains derived by Mr. Wallace from sticking, scraping, and cutting up an individual hog, putting it in sausages or packing and transporting it to the Eastern States. It would require therefore forty thousand hogs to fill the milliner's bill, and as Mr. Wallace would probably have paid £1 ahead for his hogs to tho swineherds among the nutgroves and prairies of Illinois and lowa, he would have distributed some £40,000 among those industrious settlers and workers before he could have bought Mrs. Wallace's pretty dress. Now, assuming that £100 a year, or £2 a week, would be tho likely remuneration for each one engaged in minding tho hogs, that pretty dress has given steady and comfortable employment for a year to a little army of, say, four hundred men. And as the people in those parts all marry and raise children as well as hogs, Mrs. Wallace'? dress represents the sustenance of two thousand men, women, and little children id the backwoods of lowa and Illinois for a whole twelve months.

MORE PORK. Now let us follow the hogs to Chicago. Anyone that has seen Mr. Wallace's or any other hog-curing establishment in the great City of Pork knows that the hog goes into one end of the machinery shed a struggling, screaming pig, and comes out at the other in nicely-moulded sausages; bub that in the weird procession in which the hogs ghostlike travel onward in suspension, they are encountered at overy stage by men armed with offensive weapons, who stab, and cut, and scrape, and slash at them as they pass, reducing them ultimately into the sectional Darts in which they subsequently travel to New Orleans in one direction and to Boston and Now York in the other; and that what with these, and the carpenter! and coopers the nailers and the hoop- ■ workers, the porters and tho freightraen, Mr. Wallace will have oxpended another ten shillings at least on every hog, and gob it back again from the market before he can put a farthing past for Mrs. Wallace's pretty dress. This would represent probably another twenty thousand pounds, 01 the means of susteuauce for a year of apothei thousand people, workmen, wives, and children, or a total of three thousand souls, and all of this has come to them in gathering together the price of Mrs. Wallace's pretty dress. Should they hate Mrs. Wallace Should they vilify that gentle lady as the enemy of her race, and the robber of the poor? Nay, is she not to them an angel of mercy and beneficence, and is not that lovely gown of hers as the very halo of glory that surrounds the heavenly messengers of sympathy and goodness to poor suffering humanity ? > THE MATERIAL. Now come closer round me and let U! examine the pretty dress itself. It seem! to chiefly consist of silk stuff. I should say that the cocoons which produced the thread might have been paid for probably by a couple of pounds. All the rest of the cost, £9998, has been paid for the labour employed in working up those few pounds of silky fibre into the beautiful tissue of this wonderful fabric. Nay, let us go further back. The little larvae that in their t . chrysalis state span and wove for themselves the little silky envelopes, charged nothing for their cocoons, but the people that fed them and had grown the mulberry leaves, and waited on the little grubs, and unrolled their little wrappers were paid these two or three pounds for their labour: and then that lovely lace in its exquisite tracery, the filigree, and embroidery and fal-de-lals, are all the outcome of deft and active fingers that have converted those few pounds worth of silk fibre into what you see. Even those sparkling gems, the diamonds and the rubies, the opals and th« pearls, they liavo all been brought there ' and made to blaze in the gaslight through . the means, and only the means, of labout expended on them. The gold that runs in threads through the silken woof was got) from the hands of miners' working and earning their gains by honest) toil in the California gulch or the gullies of Australia. Bow many there were engaged in twining those silken threads, from the time they were taken from the little silkworm till they passed under the hands of the artist in dress, how many others were engaged in finding and working those treasures of the mine and of the deep into that iridescent tout-ensemble, or how many children and wives and husbands derived sustenance from the expenditure in the building of that) gown we cannot traco or guess; but) from the hem from which Mrs. Wallace's dainty little foot is peeping out, away up to her chiselled throat, and away down to the end of that gorgeous train, there is not a square, nob an inch, not a line, not _« thread, but is the product of labour paid.

THE DIVISION OF IT. Mrs. Wallace has the dress ; the worker! have had all the money that was in it. If she cut it up into shreds the size of her thumb, with the diamonds and all, it would not) give to those thousands of workers, their wives, and children, but the tiniest fraction of the sums already expended among them. Mrs. Wallace has the dress only. Probably she is happy. There are said to be two object?, and only two, for which a woman dresses well. First, to please the men, and, second, to spite the other women. No doubt she found an innocent gratification it) the admiration of the men, for she must have looked very pretty in that dress—she looks very pretty in the picture. But if she felt more than an innocent gratification, or made eyes at the men, while she had a husband that hAd given her a fifty, thousand dollar dress she ought to ha scragged. If she did, and if she has tin tiniest little bit of a conscience, it must | have been uneasy amid all her glory ; for, if there is a nan who should command the undivided fealty and .devotion of a woman') heart, and should stand as a hero in bet eyes, it is the man who has given her * fifty-thousand-dollar dress made oat of sticking bogs. As for the second phase of womanly pleanure in being dressed well, Mrs. Wallace had no doubt gratification to the full. None of the other women bad a husband who would give her a fiftythousand dollar gown, even if he had stuck as many hogs as Mr. Wallace had. She therefore stood on an unapproachable pinnacle, and the other women knew it. And as sho saw them gathering around with looks of love and admiration in their eye while they pawed and clawed the glossy stuff, and notod the dazzling gems, and she knew that every one of them, even her dearest friend, in her hears of hearts said "the Cat!" sb« would not have been woman if she did not feel that glow of satisfaction thabii dear to a woman's heart. Yes, ; Mrs. Wallace was happy, as happy as any woman ought to be in a 50,000 dollar dress. But she probably sighed a sigh of relief and of simpler pleasure when all was over, and she had hung up the awful thing in her wardrobe, and wrapped herself in her nice soft, cosy flannel dressing-gown, and turned » up her little toes to the fire. And it is £i probable, too, that among the thousands rif X; people who had shared the pork butcher's \O. bounty, there were hundreds of wives in the cabins. the backwoods of lowa who, - !' sitting about in their linsey woolseya\wftb'- f their children about them, and the hogs A grunting snugly in the neighbouring pens, • had a far larger share of happiness from the '\ •: pork butcher's bounty than his own proud wV wife' enthroned 'above the heads .f of [the *sV. women of Chicago. The General. ->^ v