en for the poor, unnoticed,
faithful, never-failing common soldiers, who did the work and bore the
suffering? No _one_ man saved our country, or could save it; nor could
the men have saved it without the women. Every mother that said to her
son, Go; every wife that strengthened the hands of her husband; every
girl who sent courageous letters to her betrothed; every woman who
worked for a fair; every grandam whose trembling hands knit stockings
and scraped lint; every little maiden who hemmed shirts and made
comfort-bags for soldiers,--each and all have been the joint doers of a
great heroic work, the doing of which has been the regeneration of our
era. A whole generation has learned the luxury of thinking heroic
thoughts and being conversant with heroic deeds, and I have faith to
believe that all this is not to go out in a mere crush of fashionable
luxury and folly and frivolous emptiness,--but that our girls are going
to merit the high praise given us by De Tocqueville, when he placed
first among the causes of our prosperity the _noble character of
American women_. Because foolish female persons in New York are striving
to outdo the _demi-monde_ of Paris in extravagance, it must not follow
that every sensible and patriotic matron, and every nice, modest young
girl, must forthwith, and without inquiry, rush as far after them as
they possibly can. Because Mrs. Shoddy opens a ball in a
two-thousand-dollar lace dress, every girl in the land need not look
with shame on her modest white muslin. Somewhere between the fast women
of Paris and the daughters of Christian American families there should
be established a _cordon sanitaire_, to keep out the contagion of
manners, customs, and habits with which a noble-minded, religious
democratic people ought to have nothing to do."

"Well now, Mr. Crowfield," said the Dove, "since you speak us so fair,
and expect so much of us, we must of course try not to fall below your
compliments; but, after all, tell us what is the right standard about
dress. Now we have daily lectures about this at home. Aunt Maria says
that she never saw such times as these, when mothers and daughters,
church-members and worldly people, all seem to be going one way, and sit
down together and talk, as they will, on dress and fashion,--how to have
this made and that altered. We used to be taught, she said, that
church-members had higher things to think of,--that their thoughts ought
to be fixed on something bett