66 picked up by summer travelers! Why do all of the writers of advice on how to travel," who dwell upon the length of the menus on shipboard, omit to say that the big popular shops in Europe count annually of late years upon the American summer tourist to buy up the left overs from their regular spring trade. European shops are as full of "fakes" as those in this country, and this is saying a good deal. Why not tell the woman who will go shopping for gowns, wraps, and hats, in Paris, that if she wishes the grade of goods that makes Paris justly famed as a dress-center, she must look for the offerings of the small, privately patronized establishments? The shop-window dis plays at marvelously low prices present goods passé in style before they are put there. To a man who has crossed the Atlantic more than threescore and ten times I have just read the foregoing. "You are quite wrong," he said. "Every word you have said is true, and you have not told half that ought to be said; but if you wish what you write to be popular, you must not write unpleasant truths. Had you told how to go abroad and live elegantly for ten weeks on two hundred dollars, and illustrated the fairy-story with pictures of traveling-bags that cost five hundred dollars each and require a man servant to carry them, staterooms that are eight hundred dollars a suite, restaurants in the Bois where a dinner for four costs more than the price of a cheap ocean passage, then your article would have been read with real interest and copied widely." "Well?" MODERN EPICURES. "To roast some beef, to carve a joint with neatness, To boil up sauces, and to blow the fire, Is anybody's task; he who does this stances: Where is the place, and what the time of supper; Who are the guests, and who the entertainer; What fish he ought to buy, and where to buy it." Athenæus said this as long ago as when the Venus of Milo had arms. It is several years since Ward McAllister told Mrs. that he really could not continue to secure the flavored, whipped, and drained cream from the most carefully sterilized bottle of society to adorn her mahogany unless she forbade her chef ever again to serve a plebeian variety of barnyard duck. of its sarcasm reverberated afar off. But The small local world roared. The echoes after somebody rose to the occasion and explained that the common, or garden, variety of fowl cannot compare in juiciness, tenderness, and delectable savor with its royal gypsy relative that inhales the odors of the salt marsh, and has a fastididictum of the soothsayer was hailed as ous penchant for wild celery, then the oraculous. Everybody in smart circles to-day prides himself (which includes herself) upon knowing more about the luxuries of the table than Epicurus ever dreamed of. The art of cooking and eating was not fostered by those first-imported Americans whose descendants we pride ourselves upon being, chiefly, it sometimes seems, in order to claim membership in the Sons of This and the Daughters of That. But to-day the composition of a menu is regarded with zest by a great many people who justly claim to be of the kingdom of sweetness and light, to say nothing of those pseudo patrons of the finest arts, who secretly think that the spelling of fugue should be fudge. The other night at Delmonico's, of the five men who sat at the table next to me, three were leaders in the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, and incidentally a banker of importance, a legal light, and man of letters. One I did not recognize. The fifth is president of a university that cannot play football, but otherwise ranks high. Perhaps they had passed the afternoon in discussing the pros and cons of the placing-out system as against the institution plan of caring for dependent youngsters. I do not know. When I saw them they were defending their pet theories about dressing green salads. They ordered five separate wherewithals for this chief blessing of the civilized dinner. Each man of the five dressed his salad to prove his point, and then sat in judgment on the other four methods and results. * * In my youthful days whoever ventured to refer to food at the table was proclaimed a boor if over the age of discretion, and if under that age a subject for precepts and preachments. Now at the dinners to which an invitation is the crown of social endeavor, one hears the prettiest woman and the cleverest man settling the destiny of the race over the soup, analyzing the virtues of champagne sauce versus sherry, basting for roast ham over the relevé, and natural versus artificial links with the game. The woman of social distinction is quick-witted. Her own tastes in food and drink may not be naturally fine, but she cultivates a shrewdly simulated interest in the palate that defies detection. The mistress of a home who would establish a reputation for knowing all there is to know about the art of dining has much to learn. It is a grief to the feminine mind to set aside one's gorgeous hock glasses, bedizened with gold and jewels, towering in their eight-inch splendor, for one's luncheons for women only; but it has to be after one learns that the masculine connoisseur in wine enjoys the tint as much as the taste of it, and wishes the serving-glass plain and unadorned. Such adorable implements for eating as are now provided by the potter, the glassblower, and the silversmith! The elegant woman shuns parade. Her table no less than her person reflects the refinement that is the soul of good form. She does not provide sang-du-boeuf-bordered plates with center-paintings by famous artists for her filet, or porcelain pictures of fishes tortured by hook and line for the fish, or facsimiles of dead, or even live, animals for the game. But this does not prevent her paying four thousand dollars for a service of pearl-white china with delicate festoons of the Napoleonic laurel of the days of the Empire, if she chances to like that design and wishes a set of it made to order, as did a Dame of Divers Ducats recently. As for the woman who does not know which dishes taste best in order of their presentation to the palate, and just which sauces come nearest to nectars, she is a social nonentity.. The latest coffee-pot, too, is an English inspiration in point of locality. It was designed, as a matter of fact, by an American bachelor whose worldly affairs keep his permanent quarters in a delightful house near London's "Marble Arch," the which, whatever its historical significance, is now chiefly noted as one of the points beyond which 'bus rates are augmented. young inventor of this new coffee-pot knew that the Russian principle (good only in coffee, tea, and literature) is the best possible one for a coffee-pot, as it preserves both strength and flavor; he also knew, as every coffee-lover does, that every coffeepot on the market injures the flavor of coffee after it has been used a few times, The no matter how carefully it is looked after. He conceived the idea of trying silver, and had a pot on the Rusisan lines hammered out of silver by hand. The result was perfection. One who appreciates coffee can tell blindfolded whether coffee is made in a silver pot or in one of some other metal. The amateur inventor did not hide his discovery under a bushel, and now silver coffee-pots are being put upon the market. They cost a good deal, and if one needs to consider expense, it is well to know that a copper pot silver-lined is, like a cloud, better than one without a silver lining. Of course, serving-pots of silver are an old story, but the barbarous method of making coffee in the kitchen and pouring it over into a silver serving-show-pot for the table belongs to the dark ages. Ugh! Coffee should be served WHERE the fact that every cook's fingers have been dipped into them." There is one of the new dress-fabrics. What possessed the manufacturers to select for their illustrated advertising the figure of a vulgar, corpulent, offensivelooking man? Then note the really delicious catsup, with its advertisements picturing a commonplace man of the type that eats with his napkin tucked under his chin, and who handles his knife and fork as if they were weapons! Another advertiser in order to show that a person may eat "all he wants," provid ing he takes the blank dyspepsia cure, illustrates his advertising with the sort of man who dines in evening clothes, but at a table laded as no table ever is in any private house or restaurant where a correctly dressed man would think of dining. This table shows among other eccentricities a champagne bottle and a sherry glass, and beside them a breakfast-cup of steaming tea or coffee. T * * ADVER TISERS BLUNDER. The busi ness of advertising deserves to be counted among the many modern wonders. It is difficult to imagine any greater development in advertising than it has already Ought not a dealer who advertises fine harness and correct styles in all equipments for driving to know better than to picture in his advertisements a four-in-hand with a man in the boxseat beside the whip, and all three women of the party sitting in a seat achieved along material lines, although by themselves behind the two men. advertising enthusiasts say that it is still in its infancy. But advertising as an art has barely made a beginning. Some of its shortcomings are so apparent it seems odd that they should escape the eagle eye of the most mundane advertiser, since they operate decidedly against the volume of his business. For example, cooks no doubt do poke their fingers into food they are preparing. But why thrust this unpleasant fact into the faces of those whom the advertiser of a food is anxious to win for customers? How many women I have heard say, "Well, Blank's soups and extracts will never appeal to me so long as he dwells on * * Advertising needs women. Men understand the business of it up to a certain point. But the great majority of the advertising men live in the world of "hustle and get there," and sometimes hustle so fast they stumble and fail to arrive, or arrive in much less advantageous fashion than would be possible had they been coached cleverly. I do not think that the business of soliciting advertisements is ever likely to attract many women, or to be successfully followed by many of those who attempt it. But as writers and illustrators of advertisements, and as censors and critics of advertising, women have a 66 66 The first of these conclusions involves an inaccuracy. The vices of different classes do not admit of comparison in the manner here ventured upon. The difference is not a matter of degree in vice, but of kinds. The sins of Monte Carlo may be as scarlet " and those of Whitechapel 'red like crimson," but you cannot say that the scarlet is worse than the crimson, or the crimson a more hateful sin-color than the scarlet. The fact is that men of varying conditions and placing in the world have differing breakingstrains of character, like ropes and sustaining beams. There are strains upon character peculiar to the conditions of wealth and worldly fashion, and other strains which come upon the poor and the toiling and the unsuccessful. Under the one human nature snaps; under the other it bends and becomes distorted. But it is possible to be as big a sinner in one place as in another, and the conditions at Monte Carlo and in Whitechapel are equally favorable to moral enormity and degradation, each after its own kind. The moral evil of the world is great wherever you look, in every direction and either high or low, and the problem of dealing with it is, on all sides, of desperate aspect. Nevertheless, the clergyman cited above has hit upon a noteworthy idea in declaring for a missionary crusade among the "higher circles." One of the key-notes of Christianity has been that "the poor have the Gospel preached unto them." It has not saved them, however, from their poverty and its peculiar stresses and temptations. It would be worth while to try preaching the strait, clean, unvitiated Gospel to the rich, and see if it would save them from their wealth. Under the conditions now prevailing in America, wealth and the moral lia. bilities of it constitute what is perhaps the chiefest modern danger to the spiritual integrities of men. We seem in a way to prove that affirmation of the New Testament that "the love of money is the root of all evil." It can be shown, we apprehend. that it is to-day the root of more evil, both in individual lives and in national life, than ever before in the history of the world. Indeed, the moral fortunes of mankind are very likely to turn on this question of what we are to do about wealth, about substance, about materials, about economic goods. There is a test here, which the age is applying, directly, unsparingly, and which will be crucial and final as to human character. But where and who are the missionaries who are fitted just now to preach a reclaiming gospel with effective power to the higher circles? power to overrun the earth for the aggrandizement of heroes and kings. Then came an era when power justified itself in spreading and defending religious faith, even by the sword, the beheading ax, and the inquisitorial tortures. And now, in these later days, we find power asserting its right to push civilization forward, by armed force if necessary, over all the frontiers that face savagery or the half-developments of mankind. In other words, we have adopted, in place of the divine right of kings, the divine right of civilization. The aboriginal man and the tardily evolving man are no longer to be tolerated. Their existence here and there on the earth blots and disfigures the surface of it. These are shame-spots, rebuking those who dwell in the light and know the better ways for humankind. Therefore, are we called to a task, and all the power of modern societies must be directed to its achieving. A few centuries ago, men in adventuring ships first circumnavigated the world for discovery and exploration only. Now we must send our ships, even our war-ships, and our missionaries, even in the form of martial hosts, to carry civilization into the farthest corners and minutest crannies of the earth. This is the modern "onward cry-the expression, seemingly, of a new missionary enthusiasm bestirring the more advanced nations in the great circle of Christendom. There can be no question of the opportunity open to civilized nations to lend a helping hand to weaker peoples who stumble in the path of development or tread it with a hesitating step. The only question-and the only one, we apprehend, which men are quarreling about in America to-day-is as to methods of procedure. There is an almost unanimous approval of the general idea of expansion. But how?— that is the question. Shall it be by persuasion, by persistence in the proffer of friendly offices, by the associations of peace. and by the conquests of knowledge and reason? Or shall it be by the disciplines of power? The temptation is to make haste. We are impatient of the processes which seem to waste modern days. We want to force results and speed the issues of human time. And indeed it would be well if we could diers, absolutely fearless of death, and able to live on next to nothing." Now, if we can imagine China's countless populations unified, and the enormous armies she could maintain thoroughly drilled and equipped and led by genius, it would tax the forces of Europe to prevent the Mongol from overrunning the world. If this should come to pass, it would be to the great disadvantage of Europe that her great powers have taught China certain lessons. To the Chinese mind Europe means Gunboats, Opium, the Tricks of Diplomacy, and Aggressive Religion. If China ever comes back at Europe under conditions giving her the military advantage and the successes of conquest, these lessons are likely to be boomerangs smiting the European peoples in the face. Suppose some turn in Asiatic affairs to put Japan alongside of China in defensive and afterward in offensive alliance. There might ensue a new and startling régime of political readjustment. The coming century might witness the "dismemberment" of the British Empire and the "partitioning" of Russia, France, and Germany. We do not prophesy these results. But if the conditions should be laid for Asiatic supremacy, the methods now pursued by the powers would be quite certain to be returned upon them. Oriental gunboats would dominate our seas and shores, forcing opium or something equally unwelcome upon us in turn, backing up an unscrupulous diplomacy, and sustaining by force the missionary enterprises of an aggressive Buddhism. |