Sinful Extravagance

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jul 21, 1909

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 36, No. 28.

Sinful Extravagance

Sinful Extravagance.— So The Farm Journal calls the profligacy that is manifest in this country at the present time. For instance, the national government is launching out in the building of immense and numerous great battle-ships with a deficit of $100,000,000 staring it in the face. The Journal remarks: “There are thousands of women in this country who pay from $100 to $200 for a collection of feathers, ribbons, and velvets to wear on their heads and that several times a year; men and women who pay $500 or $1,000 for an overcoat or a cloak. Some women declare that they can not dress decently on less than $60,000 a year.” A woman who has figured recently in a divorce court declares that $40,000 a year is necessary to dress properly and that it is utterly beneath her position in society to wear a dress more than once whatever its cost. This extravagance is imitated all the way down until men and women, as The Journal expresses it, “pawn their homes, and their furniture, and their salaries in order to get the money to buy diamonds and other follies.” And it well asks: “Where will it all end? And how long must America wait for the ‘voice of one crying in the wilderness’ to tell us of our folly and warn us of our danger?” It was even thus that the Roman Republic before its destruction indulged in extravagance and folly.