The Machine is not only the Great Liberator, it is the Great Leveler also.  It is the most powerful of the forces for democracy.  An aristocracy can hardly be maintained except by distinction in dress, and distinction in dress can only be maintained by sumptuary laws or costliness.  Sumptuary laws are unconstitutional in this country, hence the stress laid upon costliness.  But machinery tends to bring styles and fabrics within the reach of all.  The shopgirl is almost as well dressed on the street as her rich customer.  The man who buys ready-made clothing is only a few weeks behind the vanguard of the fashion.  There is often no difference perceptible to the ordinary eye between cheap and high-priced clothing once the price tag is off.  Jewels as a portable form of concentrated costliness have been in favor from the earliest ages, but now they are losing their factitious value through the advance of invention.  Rubies of unprecedented size, not imitation, but genuine rubies, can now be manufactured at reasonable rates.  And now we may hope that lace may soon be within the reach of all, not merely lace of the established forms, but new and more varied and intricate and beautiful designs, such as the imagination has been able to conceive, but the hand cannot execute.

Dissolving nitrocellulose in ether and alcohol we get the collodion varnish that we are all familiar with since we have used it on our cut fingers.  Spread it on cloth instead of your skin and it makes a very good leather substitute.  As we all know to our cost the number of animals to be skinned has not increased so rapidly in recent years as the number of feet to be shod.  After having gone barefoot for a million years or so the majority of mankind have decided to wear shoes and this change in fashion comes at a time, roughly speaking, when pasture land is getting scarce.  Also there are books to be bound and other new things to be done for which leather is needed.  The war has intensified the stringency; so has feminine fashion.  The conventions require that the shoe-tops extend nearly to skirt-bottom and this means that an inch or so must be added to the shoe-top every year.  Consequent to this rise in leather we have to pay as much for one shoe as we used to pay for a pair.

Here, then, is a chance for Necessity to exercise her maternal function.  And she has responded nobly.  A progeny of new substances have been brought forth and, what is most encouraging to see, they are no longer trying to worm their way into favor as surreptitious surrogates under the names of “leatheret,” “leatherine,” “leatheroid” and “leather-this-or-that” but come out boldly under names of their own coinage and declare themselves not an imitation, not even a substitute, but “better than leather.”  This policy has had the curious result of compelling the cowhide men to take full pages in the magazines to call attention to the forgotten virtues of good old-fashioned sole-leather!  There are now upon the market synthetic shoes that a vegetarian could wear with a clear conscience.  The soles are made of some rubber composition; the uppers of cellulose fabric (canvas) coated with a cellulose solution such as I have described.