Untitled article by C. P. B.

Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · September 25, 1890

FromThe American Sentinel, Vol. 5, No. 38

An Opportunity.

By C. P. B.

THE World complains that “the closing of the season at the summer resorts of fashion finds the participants in the life at these places as satiated and fagged out as they were at the end of the winter.” “They have,” says the World, “simply changed the scene, and the form of social dissipation, which makes so many of our fashionable women haggard at thirty, and old at a time when they should be either in their prime or just entering upon that beautiful and poetic period described by the French wit and philosopher as ‘the youth of old age.’ To substitute breakfast parties, luncheons, balls, dress parades, and other forms of rivalry, feasting and excitement, in the country, for the pleasures of town in the winter, is to divert vacation from its uses, and to rob a change of its intended benefit. It is a part of the national habit of ‘burning the candle at both ends,’ which causes our women to ‘fade early,’ and gives us so many broken down or prematurely aged young men. It is a pity that a people with such a capacity for work should not be able to cultivate more of a genius for repose.”

Does not the World know that there is such a thing as paternalism in government? and that this dissipation in the resorts of fashion affords an excellent opportunity to demonstrate the benefits to be derived from the fatherly care of the police power of the State? Why in the name of the logic of the American Sabbath Union does not the World get a clause tacked on to the Sunday law requiring these people “to cultivate more of a genius for repose,” or at least to repose more, whether they cultivate the genius or not? Possibly those ministers who are so profoundly concerned about a civil rest with at least a moiety of religious regard, could be induced to incorporate something of this kind with the measures which they are now pushing so vigorously both in and out of Congress. If the paternal theory is worth anything, it certainly ought to afford protection to those who are compelled by that most relentless of all tyrants, Fashion, to neglect the taking of much needed rest. C. P. B.