CHILDREN AND "TYPES OF BEAUTY."

Tuapeka Times, Volume XXV, Issue XXV, 9 August 1893, Page 4

CHILDREN AND "TYPES OF BEAUTY."

It is bad enough to find the good-looking but otherwise uninteresting wives ana daughters of the weli-to-uo beseeching photographers to photograph them gratuitously in decofklii gowns and fantastic attitudes, and to get these photos displayed in shop windows and reproduced in "society" and "ladies'" periodicals, or dancing in remarkably short skirts before admiring audiences on amateur stages ; but of late, says ' Woman, 3 this spirit of snobbishness and lack of self-respect has pervaded the schoolroom and the nursery. Vulgar, obscure, and would-be "smart" mairinas arc now given tr seeking notoriety and smartness through their children. The poor little girls who have the misfortune to have been born of parents who affeot gentility, or, if they are more advanced, what they please t<- call "society," and not of refined mothers and- fathers who jealously keep their children so long as possible within the bounds of healthy childhood, are instructed almost from babyhood • in the wiles of artificiality. They are dressed up like miniatures of actresses of the less reputable kind, encouraged to write precocious letters, and even to send their photographs to strange editors in the hope that they may " see themselves in print " ; and are taught " high-kicking " so tnat they . may dance At public entertainments and provide matter for penny-a-lining paragraphers. The latest and most alarming development of this form of vulgarity is the photographing of children as " Types of Beauty " for the purpose of cheap publicity. Let the mothers of such children advertise themselves as they will ; let their grown-up daughters if they are so inclined sendwritten descriptions and photographic presentments of their personal attractions to their particular fashion papers on the eve of their marriage ; but in the name of all that is decent and sacred let us preserve the innocence and modesty of our girls while they are too young to distinguish for themselves what is. great and what is little.

A poet exclaims: "Raindrops on the roof." Of course it drops on the roof. That's what the roof is for.