A New Ism

We have already so many reformatory, revolutionary, ultra, fanatical, fantastical, etc., movements, measures, isms, ologies, etc., in embryo, just born, progressing, running wild, etc., that we can hardly keep up with their names and titles. But now comes a proposition more sweeping and more radical than all the others put together.

Is this thing predictable? Is it possible to live, move, and have our being unfashionableness Can one be out of the fashion and yet in the world? Will an anti-fashionable institution ever become popular? Will it pay? These are questions more easily asked than answered.

Suppose everybody should eat, drink, dress, and do just as everybody was self-inclined, in total disregard of one's neighbor's examples. Suppose every family should make its own clothes, and cook its own victuals, according to its own instincts or reasons, without asking Mr. London's opinion, or Mrs. Paris' consent? Would not a hundred profitable avocations at once be destroyed? Would not ten thousand dry goods merchants, and a countless host of milliners, mantua-makers, tailors, artists, fancy-dealers, etc., become bankrupts in a moment? Why, the crises of Wall street would be gentle breezes compared with the tornado which would follow such an innovation!

How would the belles and beaux of Broadway, who always have "nothing to wear," who can find "nothing to do" but to run after the fashions, who would have little or "nothing to say," unless it were in relation to the latest fashions, and who could have "nothing to eat," were it not for the saloons and restaurants—how are these fellow-creatures of ours going to keep up appearances if fashion is to be abolished?

The social, political, international and foreign aspects of the proposed measure are worth a moment's consideration. Where would our tea parties get the material of their conversational criticisms on the characters and affairs of their neighbors, if fashion was done away with? Where would politicians get their spoils, if fashion supplied no precedent for seizing on the perquisites? What would Europe do for one half of the two hundred millions of dollars we are now paying her annually in solid gold, if there was no fashion to keep up the traffic in superfluities?

Until these difficulties are in some way surmounted, we shall vote in favor of the impracticability of the scheme.