The most famous frauds of the day have resulted from this feeling.  It keeps hundreds of men struggling for their commercial existence.  The trouble is that some are caught and incarcerated, if their larceny be small.  If it be great, they escape, and build their castle on the Rhine.  Men go into jail, not because they steal, but because they did not steal enough.

Again:  excessive fashion makes people unnatural and untrue.  It is a factory from which has come forth more hollow pretences, and unmeaning flatteries, and hypocrisies, than the Lowell Mills ever turned out shawls and garments.

Fashion is the greatest of all liars.  It has made society insincere.  You know not what to believe.  When people ask you to come, you do not know whether or not they want you to come.  When they send their regards, you do not know whether it is an expression of their heart, or an external civility.  We have learned to take almost everything at a discount.  Word is sent, “Not at home,” when they are only too lazy to dress themselves.  They say, “The furnace has just gone out,” when in truth they have had no fire in it all winter.  They apologize for the unusual barrenness of their table, when they never live any better.  They decry their most luxurious entertainments, to win a shower of approval.  They apologize for their appearance, as though it were unusual, when always at home they look just so.  They would make you believe that some nice sketch on the wall was the work of a master painter.  “It was an heir-loom, and once hung on the walls of a castle; and a duke gave it to their grandfather.”  People who will lie about nothing else, will lie about a picture.  On a small income we must make the world believe that we are affluent, and our life becomes a cheat, a counterfeit, and a sham.

Few persons are really natural.  When I say this, I do not mean to slur cultured manners.  It is right that we should have more admiration for the sculptured marble than for the unhewn block of the quarry.  From many circles in life fashion has driven out vivacity and enthusiasm.  A frozen dignity instead floats about the room, and iceberg grinds against iceberg.  You must not laugh outright:  it is vulgar.  You must smile.  You must not dash rapidly across the room:  you must glide.  There is a round of bows, and grins, and flatteries, and oh’s! and ah’s! and simperings, and namby-pambyism—­a world of which is not worth one good, round, honest peal of laughter.  From such a hollow round the tortured guest retires at the close of the evening, and assures his host that he has enjoyed himself.

Thus social life has been contorted, and deformed, until, in some mountain cabin, where rustics gather to the quilting or the apple-paring, there is more good cheer than in all the frescoed ice-houses of the metropolis.

We want, in all the higher circles of society, more warmth of heart and naturalness of behavior, and not so many refrigerators.