The Hotel System

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THE HOTEL SYSTEM.

For years past the tendency of our social life has been hotel-wards. We have been getting more and more gregarious in our habits, and a tendency has gained rapidly upon us to cluster together in large boarding houses or large caravanseries capable of accommodating the population of a good-sized village. Capitalists seized the idea and splendid palaces sprung up, as if by magic, resplendent with mirrors and gilding, marvels of upholstery, gorgeous with "bridal chambers" and a dozen other extravagancies, and constituting, altogether, a peculiar and characteristic feature of American life.

The system continued to expand more and more, and just now we imagine it has reached its culminating point. The novelty has worn off, the factitious glare has in a measure disappeared, and the evils of the thing, at first hardly appreciated, are beginning to become sadly apparent.

That the evils referred to are many and grave in character none need to be told. The columns of the daily papers bear witness to a few of these, and their character will readily suggest itself to the most obtuse understanding. Half of the scandalous affairs which come to light, from time to time, and expose the hidden corruptions of our social life, take place at these whitened palaces, and may be looked upon, without any great degree of unfairness, as the natural outflowing of the life of luxurious dissipation that is carried on in their gay salons.

But without bestowing any undue weight on exceptional cases, it would be easy to make out a strong argument against hotel-life and its concomitants on merely general grounds. The tendency hotel-wards tends to destroy the home sentiment; to weaken all those domestic ties which constitute, after all, the strength and stamina of a community; to encourage the growth of extravagant ideas and dissatisfy the mind with republican simplicity; in a word, to engraft upon us as a people some of the worst features of Parisian life and character—features which are only too readily seized upon by a class so idle, so excitement-loving, and so imitative as are the patronisers of the St. Bobolink and its compeers.

It will be a sad state of things when the word "home" shall come to convey to us no other meaning than a suite of rooms at a hotel or fashionable boarding house, with a dinner in full dress, at the public table, and an evening of flirtation and "the German." Females, deprived of those legitimate cares which ought to occupy their minds, suffer from the ineffable horrors of ennui, get lazy, nervous and dyspeptic, and from over-much leisure, unhealthful food, and persevering novel-devouring, lose their freshness, their health, and, as the records of scandal too often testify, their morals. As for the men, they may be divided up into different classes. There is the steady money-making business man, from whose well-lined pockets the expenses of all this splendor are to proceed, and who is, in reality, the greatest stranger and outsider about the establishment. He is devoted to business, politics, newspapers and juleps, while Madame and Mesdemoiselles flirt with the gentlemen of elegant leisure in the meantime. Dancing men, fops, fools, be-diamonded black—legs—Heaven knows what not! afford plenty of material for the study of human nature, "make the mixture thick and slab," and constitute fashionable hotel and boarding house life what it is.

We perceive that several New York journals of high character and standing have taken up the topic and are discussing it in a serious and reasonable light. If there be any part of our social system which has evils that require to be shown up, it is this. The country cannot afford to have its home-life undermined and destroyed—its lovely and intelligent women taken out of their legitimate and fitting sphere where their intelligence and beauty ought to shine brightest, and placed in St. Bobolink parlors and the tawdry drawing rooms of up-town caravanseries, as mere lay-figures to hang crinoline upon and to coquette with the idle, worthless danglers who make a business of frivolity. The county cannot afford that the number of our genuine home-circles should be lessened as they have been lessened of late years, with a rapidity so lamentable. It is a sad sign, when the terrible words—"tired of house-keeping," are uttered; when the Lares are overthrown; when the omnivorous jaws of the hotel and big boarding house open to receive their luckless victims. It is a sign that there is something "rotten in Denmark"—that there must have been something radically false and wrong to cause a result so false and wrong. And above all, it augurs ill for the future.