monotone and
by rule, by thinking the same things and exchanging ideas until we have
none left, we shall come into that social placidity which is one dream of
the nationalists--one long step towards what may be called a prairie
mental condition--the slope of Kansas, where those who are five thousand
feet above the sea-level seem to be no higher than those who dwell in the
Missouri Valley.

THE DIRECTOIRE GOWN

We are all more or less devoted to 'liberte', 'egalite', and considerable
'fraternite', and we have various ways of showing it. It is the opinion
of many that women do not care much about politics, and that if they are
interested at all in them, they are by nature aristocrats. It is said,
indeed, that they care much more about their dress than they do about the
laws or the form of government. This notion arises from a misapprehension
both of the nature of woman and of the significance of dress.

Men have an idea that fashions are haphazard, and are dictated and guided
by no fixed principles of action, and represent no great currents in
politics or movements of the human mind. Women, who are exceedingly
subtle in all their operations, feel that it is otherwise. They have a
prescience of changes in the drift of public affairs, and a delicate
sensitiveness that causes them to adjust their raiment to express these
changes. Men have written a great deal in their bungling way about the
philosophy of clothes. Women exhibit it, and if we should study them more
and try to understand them instead of ridiculing their fashions as whims
bred of an inconstant mind and mere desire for change, we would have a
better apprehension of the great currents of modern political life and
society.

Many observers are puzzled by the gradual and insidious return recently
to the mode of the Directoire, and can see in it no significance other
than weariness of some other mode. We need to recall the fact of the
influence of the centenary period upon the human mind. It is nearly a
century since the fashion of the Directoire. What more natural,
considering the evidence that we move in spirals, if not in circles, that
the signs of the anniversary of one of the most marked periods in history
should be shown in feminine apparel? It is woman's way of hinting what is
in the air, the spirit that is abroad in the world. It will be remembered
that women took a prominent part in the destruction of the Bastile,
helping, indeed, to tear down that