nent
values, have been spent in things which have no goodness in them,
things which because of their lack of integrity and soundness must be
forever duplicated, instead of freeing industry to go ahead, producing
other good and permanent things.

What it all amounts to is that the instinct for ornament has gotten
the upper hand of a great body of American women. We have failed so
far to develop standards of taste, fitness, and quality, strong, sure,
and good enough effectually to impose themselves. There is no
national taste in dress; there is only admirable skill in adapting
fashions made in other countries. There is no national sense of
restraint and proportion. It is pretty generally agreed that getting
all you can is entirely justifiable. There is no national sense of
quality; even the rich to-day in this country wear imitation laces.
The effect of all this is a bewildering restlessness in costume--a
sheeplike willingness to follow to the extreme the grotesque and the
fantastic. The very general adoption of the ugly and meaningless
fashions of the last few years--peach-basket hats, hobble skirts,
slippers for the street--is a case in point. From every side this is
bad--defeating its own purpose--corrupting national taste and wasting
national substance.

Moreover, the false standard it sets up socially is intolerable. It
sounds fantastic to say that whole bodies of women place their chief
reliance for social advancement on dress, but it is true. They are, or
are not, as they are gowned! The worst of this fantasy is not only
that it forces too much attention from useful women, but that it gives
such poise and assurance to the ignorant and useless! If you look like
the women of a set, you are as "good" as they, is the democratic
standard of many a young woman. If for any reason she is not able to
produce this effect, she shrinks from contact, whatever her talent or
charm! And she is often not altogether wrong in thinking she will not
be welcome if her dress is not that of the circle to which she
aspires. Many a woman indifferently gowned has been made to feel her
difference from the elegant she found herself among. If she is sure of
herself and has a sense of humor, this may be an amusing experience.
To many, however, it is an embittering one!

Now these observations are not presented as discoveries! They were
true, at least, as far back as the Greeks. In fact, there is nothing
in the so-called woman's movement, whi