Inconsistency of Fashionable Society.
THE San Francisco correspondent of the Mendocino Beacon occasionally gives that thing called “society” some hard but well-deserved hits. In a recent article he gives the following account of an outrage that is so common that it rarely excites comment:— “At an evening party lately I was very much interested in watching a gentleman quite popular among the fashionable circles of this city. He occupies an important position—a foreigner by birth and education, and a gentleman not at all prepossessing in feature. Yet a nominal title and the possession of a fine income has given him a passport to our best circles. I heard of him at the Palace banquet given to Sargent; I have met him in parlor and hall. I know of his being a familiar friend at one of our most select schools. He is admired by young misses, to whom he is ever partial. And yet I know of this man, so courted and flattered, allowed the most familiar intimacy with young ladies, and introduced with great gusto here, there and everywhere—I know of his being at the Bella Union theater lately; this is one of our variety places of amusement, and frequented only by men. Yet this man was there in a box, attended by females, and visited by the ladies from the stage; champagne flowed freely, and laughter rolled out thick and fast from the half-drawn curtains. And as I watched this man, now surrounded by the purest of young misses, I could but wonder at society's strange reasoning. Here was a man, metaphorically speaking, hand in hand with two women—one good, beautiful, virtuous, the other abandoned to sin. Both could hang upon his words; but an impenetrable gulf divided the two females. He could go with either, and the world took no note of it. From the stage box of a low, cheap theater, he could enter the parlors of our richest and best and mingled with our fairest daughters. Society gives him this right; but the other sex is not allowed such lee-way. Oh, no; a woman could not so conduct herself. The old story! But has society the right to be so partial, so invidious? Who gave it the right, and how will it be judged hereafter? I question this drawing two such distinctions. I cannot reconcile my ideas of right with San Francisco interpretation of the same virtue. “A man may stoop to any crime, or sin, and his wife is powerless to resist. She must suffer, bear and forbear; but if she steps one side he, in his anger, kills her—he, the stronger; she, the weaker. In other places, they used to kill the third party, but not so here; the women alone have to suffer, while the men may clasp hands across the murdered body. Such crimes as this city has witnessed, and allowed to go unpunished, are enough to make her soil cursed, even to the burial of the dead.”