How often is suicide traceable to this false sentiment!  Vain men will give up their lives, rather than their class notions of respectability.  They will cut the thread of existence, rather than cut fashionable life.  Very few suicides are committed from real want.  “We never hear,” says Joel Barlow, “of a man committing suicide for want of a loaf of bread, but it is often done for want of a coach.”

Of this mean and miserable spirit of class and caste, women are the especial victims.  They are generally brought up with false notions of life, and are taught to estimate men and things rather by their external appearances than by their intrinsic worth.  Their education is conducted mainly with the view of pleasing and attracting the admiration of others, rather than of improving and developing their qualities of mind and heart.  They are imbued with notions of exclusiveness, fashion, and gentility.  A respectable position in society is held up to them as the mark to be aimed at.  To be criminal or vicious is virtually represented to them as far less horrible than to be “vulgar.”  Immured within the bastile of exclusivism, woman is held captive to all the paltry shifts and expediencies of convention, fashion, gentility, and so forth.  The genuine benevolence of her nature is perverted; her heart becomes contracted; and the very highest sources of happiness—­those which consist in a kindly sympathy with humanity in all ranks of life—­are as a well shut up and a fountain sealed.

Is it not a fact, that in what is called “fashionable society,” a fine outside appearance is regarded almost in the light of a virtue?—­that to be rich, or to have the appearance of riches, is esteemed as a merit of a high order;—­whereas, to be poor, or to seem so, ranks as something like an unpardonable offence?  Nay, such is the heartlessness of this class spirit, that a young woman, belonging to the better class, who, by misfortune or family reverses, has been thrown upon her own resources, and who endeavours, by her own honest hands, to earn her honest bread, immediately loses caste, and is virtually expelled from “respectable” society.  The resolution to be independent—­the most invigorating resolution which can take possession of the human mind—­is scouted in such circles as a degrading thing; and those who have been brought up within the influence of fashion, will submit to the most severe privations, rather than submit to the loss of their class and caste respectability!

Thus brought up, it is no wonder that woman has been the co-partner with man in upholding the general extravagance of the age.  There never was such a rage for dress and finery amongst English women as there is now.  It rivals the corrupt and debauched age of Louis XV. of France.  A delirium of fashion exists.  Women are ranked by what they wear, not by what they are.  Extravagance of dress, and almost indecency of dress, has taken the place of simple womanly beauty.  Wordsworth once described the “perfect woman nobly planned.”  Where will you find the perfect woman now?  Not in the parti-coloured, over-dressed creature—­the thing of shreds and patches—­with false hair, false colour, false eyebrows, false everything.  “Some of nature’s journeymen have made them, and not made them well, they imitate humanity so abominably.”