p. 11 | What a Dog Did

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jul 23, 1912

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 39, No. 28.

What a Dog Did

THAT title may be a little too strong. It probably should be said, What women did; for the dog was a poor, innocent, helpless thing. But a dog luncheon was held in New York by a lady of wealth, in honor of her $5,000 Chinese Chow dog Vi Sin; given at the Vanderbilt Hotel, and cost about $75.00, at which eight dogs sat, or were held by eight society women who chaperoned them. It stirred New York papers to some extent. One minister said:

"It sometimes seems as if New York were passing through some of the vices of decadence that were observed in Rome just before the fall of the empire. The test of the city and its civilization is the attitude of its women toward life. When women become thoughtless toward the little children of the tenement houses, and give banquets in hotels with dogs as their guests, it would seem as if vices that once crawled as serpents over the threshold of Nero's palace, are now leaving a little slime on the marble steps of the American home."

A Catholic priest truly said:

"People who would do such a thing as to give a dinner in honor of a pet dog, and those who attend such a function, are the enemies of society, and the provokers of Socialism and anarchy. Surely better means can be taken to procure notoriety and publicity than by fashionable dinners in honor of a dog. Why not go into a poor neighborhood and select a dozen of the poorest children to be found there, and give them a dinner? There are many poor people out of work, or perhaps sick and in need, who become embittered, dissatisfied, and opposed to those who possess such wealth as enables them to lavish it on a dog, or a monkey."

A newspaper said:

"This manifestation of degenerate extravagance flares out against the growing discontent of the time like a torch in darkness. . . . Society reports of affairs of this kind serve as campaign documents and topical lessons for all forms of discontent. Socialists and anarchists and rebellious spirits of poverty, or of misunderstood talent, read of these dog luncheons and monkey banquets with as much interest as society itself, and they do not forget them. . . . If plutocracy has not already gone mad with prosperity, it will not flaunt its Pekingese spaniels too often in the face of a food-taxed people."

And one woman of fashion said:

"The idea of people talking so! and poor little Vi Sin to have caused all that trouble."

It is a sad, sad commentary that with all the needs and wants and demands of this great, big, suffering world, women can find nothing better to employ their time. But it probably was just as respectable and proper as some of the wretched drinking bouts in which men engage. Would that they could get a vision of the eternal judgment of God, for which an account will be given of the time and money and talents thrown away, or worse than wasted.