regular working of affiliations which her parents established years before her début. If they have always tried to fulfil the cardinal law of society, a cutlet for a cutlet,' if they have kept up their visiting list and rendered their home attractive, their grown daughters, through the consequent interchange with the daughters of friends, will be likely to make the acquaintance of at least a few desirable candidates for matrimony. A summer outing of a few weeks at the seashore or in the mountains will be considered almost indispensable. The blossom-time is short, and parents should not be censured for wishing to render it bright and happy, a beautiful memory in afterdays of care and responsibility. If the bud is frostbitten and blighted, the fruit will be sour and shrivelled. Old ladies tell us that their grandmothers' outfits as débutantes often consisted of two cotton prints for morning wear, a woollen afternoon dress, with the addition of a bonnet and pelisse for visiting, and one or two white muslins for evening parties, ribbons and natural flowers of different colours giving variety to the costume. Buoyant young belles from the best country families spent gay winters in Washington content with such an outfit. The daughter of a twelve or fourteen-hundred dollar clerk in one of the departments there would disdain it now, for it would place her on an unequal footing with her companions. She could not bring in her young friends to a dance, and follow it with an impromptu feast of gingerbread, apples, nuts, and cider, in a basement dining-room, minus embroidered centrepiece, flowers, and bonbons. A watchful, ingenious mother may clothe her débutante daughter from bargain counters, but she cannot feed her and her associates from them. Bargain counters in the markets would be dangerous to the public health. It will be urged that girls should adjust their costumes, entertainments, their outlay in toto, to their resources. As a matter of fact they are obliged to do this, but they are excusable for aspiring to the best things within view, for this sort of emulation is atmospheric, it is the very ozone of republican institutions. It is plain that a young lady's chances are influenced to a considerable extent by the rate of expenditure her parents can afford. At best a suitable marriage cannot always be effected. Opportunity along this line is pre-eminently coy and elusive. It is far wiser for her to remain single to the end of her days than to mate recklessly. Opportunity is elusive also in the line of the art, business, or profession the girls have studied for the purpose of maintaining themselves. Never before were there so many openings for women, and never did such a throng of eager applicants stand around, about, athwart, before, behind, and between one another at each open door. The excellence guaranteed by certificates, diplomas, and civil service examinations must be reinforced by the same amount of influence and patronage that was indispensable before these latter-day credentials of fitness were exacted. Never were the lunatic, the epileptic, the incurable so humanely housed and tended; but charity does not embrace the weak, the inefficient, the mediocre. Never in the history of civilisation were so many weak, foredoomed contestants for a livelihood brought into battle with the strong. Advanced medical science and improved sanitation are preserving the unfit to be subsequently pushed to the wall. By the finest law of equity women should receive equal wages with men who are doing the same kind of work. When this law is recognised competition will be rendered all the fiercer. Many women are employed now for economical reasons. When wages become equal the average female employee will be dismissed if as useful a male be available to take her place. Women who are superlatively useful will be retained, and their less capable, more indolent fathers, husbands, and brothers too often will lie back and rest on their oars. Thus a full recognition of the claims of the female sex will increase the pressure upon it. No one would wish to see woman relegated to her former place in the working world. Progressive experiments must be carried out to their logical sequence, and in course of time demand and supply will come into more harmonious relations. For several generations, however, the process is bound to cause strain and suffering, to involve the ruthless sacrifice of delicate frames and still more delicate instincts, of artistic tastes and soulful longings. Born race-horses will perforce turn themselves into dray-horses, their fire and mettle at the start not availing to save them from sinking under the heavy load and the crushing wheel of routine. Meanwhile is it surprising that far-sighted, sympathetic mothers with small incomes should not pray that they may be given six lovely daughters to precipitate into this mêlée ? Wedded pairs deemed 'rich' by fellow-townsmen who have nothing share this feeling of insecurity to some extent. The difficulty of making safe investments, the reduced interest paid on capital, the daily news of deterioration and loss of fortune in unsuspected directions create a fear of insufficient provision for a numerous progeny. Millionaires with few or no children of their own have contributed incalculably to the advance of civilisation by the endowment of hospitals, colleges, and libraries for the benefit of the children of their fellow-citizens. It becomes evident that the self-preserving instinct, the necessity for concentrating advantages, is the chief factor in this noticeable appreciation of the small family on the part of our most refined and best-educated citizens. The modern tendency in all grades is towards the development and elevation of the individual as a unit. It is the individual that counts in the business world, which has to do solely with the unit. The small family is more favourable than the large one to the production of the unit, because it gives a better training for the order and system which bear so directly upon success in business, nor does it lack the opportunity for improving other sides of personal character. In a widespreading band of brothers and sisters the suppression of some member's interests too often becomes inevitable, and unselfishness carried to the superlative degree amounts to suicide. If civilisation in the future is to depend solely upon the numbers of its present exponents, it cannot be assured, for the Washed will always be outnumbered by the Unwashed. Quality rather than quantity is the assurance each generation, each family should endeavour to give to the future, and the duty to the near should always take precedence of the duty to the far. More vital energies, moral, mental, and physical advantages, in all probability, will be transmitted to posterity by three or four highly individualised, wellequipped representatives of a family, than by eight or ten povertystricken weaklings and degenerates. Apparently our more recently adopted citizens, the ever-landing Celt, Teuton, Slav, and Latin, are not discouraged by difficulties in rearing large families on slender incomes, hence the ultimate passing of the Anglo-Saxon as a ruling factor in this government is confidently predicted. The framers of our Constitution, in their spirit of boundless hospitality, paved the way for the displacement of their own descendants, and in doing their utmost to prevent the monopoly of power by an oligarchy or an aristocracy the decline of family prestige and influence became a foregone conclusion. The Adamses of Massachusetts gave two Presidents to the young Republic, and have continued to enjoy social prominence, at one time sending a minister to the Court of St. James's. The Lees of Virginia have contributed a dominant figure to the field of American history in every generation from the colonial to the present period. But these are rare instances. More and more new names are heard in official places. More than twenty nationalities are represented in our army and navy. After a while the term 'American' will convey the idea of a mixture. There are still a good many unadulterated Anglo-Saxons, however. In the New England States there has been but little mingling with foreign blood, and the English Puritan is distinctly visible as a prevailing type among the educated classes. But in Boston, their metropolis, an incongruous spectacle is presented: Puritans in blood and the Protestant instinct are living under a city government that is administered by Irish Catholics. In the Southern States also there is no appreciable evidence of foreign admixture by marriage with the Anglo-Saxon until we come to the Gulf, save for the strain of French Huguenot blood in South Carolina. In the Gulf States the French and Spanish ancestry of a large proportion of the residents becomes decidedly marked. Owing to altered conditions in the South, an English type formerly prominent through vast areas is rapidly disappearing. 'Taps' has sounded for the landed proprietor, a hospitable country gentleman at home, a brave knight on the field of battle. Peace to the generous soul of the Cavalier! The reverent throng of twenty thousand that not long ago followed the bier of General Wade Hampton was paying tribute, not only to his fine personality and honourable record, but to the vanishing of an old influential order. A very different Anglo-Saxon type persisted in the more limited area of the city of Philadelphia from colonial times up to our Civil War. The Quaker merchant was an object-lesson in honesty and thrift to the business circles of the nation. Though declining to fight, he was ready to die for his principles. Frugal and saving, he loved money well, but he loved honour more, for he refused to profit by the bankrupt law when he failed in business. This respected figure in a plain grey coat and broad-brimmed hat, whose yea and nay were worth more than many an oath, left a stable impress on Philadelphia. Solitary specimens of the genus may still be discerned in the old haunts. The Anglo-Saxon stamp will be retained on our language, customs, laws, and literature. In other directions we cannot keep what we have, but we can transmute the things that we have into the things that we are.' This transmutation is going on all the time. There have been many apparent wrecks; the disintegration of estates, the impoverishment of clans, the deflection of trade currents, the losses by storm, pest, and warfare, the absorption through intermarriage have wrought radical changes, yet up to this date we remain fairly civilised as a nation, except for occasional lapses into savagery when lynching criminals at home and torturing Filipinos abroad. There are prophets who even fear that our conglomeration of white nationalities will be extinguished in the end by a Black and Yellow overflow. Without doubt the locust, the potato-bug, the army-worm, even the insignificant house-fly, coming in vast incalculable hordes, could succeed in crowding out human life. If such a catastrophe could be averted at the time of imminent danger, it would only be by a supreme exercise of the highly-organised human brain as an offset to the persevering destructive instinct of the lower organism. It being generally admitted that no special class or nationality among us can expect to remain dominant, it is also generally desired that the race we all hold in common, the White, should continue at the helm. In furtherance of this aim it becomes imperative that every white citizen should preserve a superiority in something deeper than skin, as he cannot trust to numbers. He must seek to exercise and to develop the native endowment of faculty which he owes to his highly-organised race, an endowment superior to the inheritance of other races. The aggregate of this endeavour and accomplishment should suffice for the retention of a now undisputed sceptre. As each new generation takes up the rule it should make and enforce laws on a sound sociological and economic basis, and these will promote true and legitimate progress in all directions. Let no reckless legislator attempt to break down the long-standing embankment between the white and the inferior races who are dwelling within our gates. Along the Mississippi'cutting the levee ' is counted one of the worst crimes against the State. Communities having only a tiny stream to fear can better afford to neglect precautionary measures. In face of all prophecy and speculation, however, the Whither remains as impenetrable as the Whence. No generation can discern its evolutionary trend and bearing upon its own or any other race. Evolution is always an unconscious process to the participants therein. The remnant of despised Israelites fleeing to the desert from the tyranny of Egypt looked hopefully towards a Promised Land which would be walled in from the outside heathen by separating rites and strictest regulations. The wandering Hebrew did not suspect that his grandest prerogative was to be, not the exclusive ownership of an earthly paradise, but the transmission of his monotheistic conception of the Deity to alien races until finally it should encompass the globe. When the African captive crossed an unknown sea, mourning his dusky brood, his sunbaked hut, the idea could never have entered his thick skull that a cruel wrong to himself and his countrymen would be overruled in the end by the benefits of a civilisation attainable in no other way. It is only long after a series of events that the thoughtful, philosophical student of history comes upon an evolutionary trail and begins to understand the making of an epoch. A peculiar thrill often attends such a discovery, for in that trail something becomes manifest to him that he can attribute neither to accident nor coincidence, only to design. This leads up to a great Designer by a logical argument that cannot always be traced in the story of an individual or of a generation. Baltimore, Md., U.S.A. FRANCES ALBERT DOUGHTY. |