But how was it before the war, and how will it be
after it?

To prove what I say, let me dwell a moment on two or three of the most
prominent faults of our women, pronounced such by all the world. Of
these, the most mischievous and glaring, the most ruinous in thousands
of cases, is _extravagance_. Wastefulness is almost become a trait of
our society. American women, especially, are profuse and lavish of money
in dress, in equipage, in furniture, in houses, in entertainments, in
every particular of life. Everywhere this foolish and wasteful use of
money challenges the surprise and sarcasm of the observant foreign
tourist through our country. Perhaps the largeness and immensity of our
land, its resources and material, as well as the wonderful national
advance we have already made, tends to cultivate in our people a feeling
of profusion and a habit of extravagant display; but it is not in
sympathy either with our creed or our profession.

Were the money thus heedlessly expended made for them by slaves whom
they had from infancy been taught to regard as created solely to make
money for them to use and enjoy, this extravagant waste of money, while
none the less selfish and inexcusable, would appear to grow
spontaneously out of the arbitrary rule of slavery; or, if it had
descended to them by legal or ancestral inheritance, there might be some
show of reason for using it carelessly, though very small sense in so
doing. But in a land where labor is the universal law; where, if a man
makes money, he must work and sweat for its possession; when fortunes do
not arise by magic, but must be built up slowly, painfully, at the
expense of the nerve and sinew, the brain and heart of the builders, and
these builders, not slaves, but our fathers, husbands, brothers; when a
close attention to money-making is rapidly becoming a national badge,
and is in danger of eating out entirely what is of infinitely more value
than wealth--a high national integrity and conscience--and of sinking
the immaterial and intellectual in the material and sensual; in such
circumstances as these, I say, and under such temptations and dangers,
it is a sin, an unnatural crime, to squander what costs so dear.

Volumes might be written upon the frightful consequences of this
extravagance in money matters, this living too fast and beyond their
means, of which American women, especially, are guilty. Great financial
crises, in which colossal schemes burst like bub