OUR YOUNG WOMEN.

Otago Witness, Issue 1190, 19 September 1874, Page 21

OUR YOUNG WOMEN.

(Sunday Chronicle—San Francisco J The young women of America of the present generation^ seem to have entirely lost the capacity for enjoying the simple and inexpensive pleasures which sufficed for their grandmothers. Unless they can live in an atmosphere of constant excitement they are miserable. Fashion and style, costly dresses and splendid entertainments, palatial residences and ambitious equipages, are no longer regarded by tHera as the luxuries of life, but as indispensable necessaries, without which existence becomes a humiliation and a burden. Display and extravagance are necessary to enjoy ment, and an insane disposition to measure the satisfaction to be derived from any pleasure by its coat pervades all ranks of society, The wealthy give themselves up to the semi-barbarism of ostentatious living, and people of moderate incomes are drawn into the terrible vortex by an inordinate and often fatal ambition. Hence comes the fearful animal crop of defalcations, embezzlements, breaches of trust, and other crimes of a still darker complexion. Hence, in the desperate effort to win fortunes at a stroke, or by a bold risk to avert impending financial ruin, come wild speculations, gigantic swindling schemes, and reckless gambling. To this cause may be traced iiialf the suicides which haye become so qorbjnon that they cease to shock us. The extravagance of our living is answerable in a large measure for the corruption of our morals. On the altar of fashion men daily sacrifice their integrity and women their virtue. Unless all current testimony as to American manners and morals in this year of our Lord 1874 are grossly exaggerated republican New York and republican Washington are not far behind the powdered Paris of the Regent d'Orleans or the libertine London of Charles 11. And we feel justified in declaring that for this fearful condition of things the women of America are mainly responsible. As a general thing, men are not strongly possessed by that kind of ambition which finds its gratification in fashionable extravagance and costly establishments. It is not often that a man of mature years, in the possession of the comforts of life, is so weak as to feel miserable because his neighbour or his friend lives in a more Bplendid mansion, maintains a more showy establishment, or gives more magnificent entertainments than he can himself afford. It is only to the feminine heart that the pomps and vanities are so dear as to make any sacrifice seem slight that is necessary to compass them. It was the social ambition of a wife that not long ago induced a member of Congress who had borne a spotless reputation to sell his influence as a legislator and left him with a blasted character and ruined career. It was the same fatal thirst for fashionable distinction on the part of a beautiful and accomplished woman that more recently drove a distinguished lawyer and rising statesman to petty frauds upon the' Department of Justice, the exposure of which has blighted his future prospects. No one who knows the changes in our social conditions and in the style of living, that have been going on for the last twenty years, and more especially since "Jhe close of the war, can be blind to the rapid demoralization of what are called "the upper classes" of our sooiety. Springing, as the evil undoubtedly does, from' certain ineradicable tendencies, in human nature, and from causes which are Btill in active operation, it does not se.em easy to prescribe a remedy. The exhortations of the pulpit and the press appear to produce no appreciable effect; and* we have little hope of seeing the current' stemmed until the class of American women who, by their social position and their wealth, have the power of setting the stamp of fashion upon such cuatoms and usages as they will, shall unite to wield that power in restoring the simplicity in dress and the frugality in living which prevailed in the days of our grandmothers. Whether any such united and concerted effort on the part of those by whom alone it can be made successful is a thing that can be regarded as among the hopeful probabilities, is a problem for the solution of which we do not at present feel competent.