The Drawer anticipates a period of repose in all our feverish social life.  We shall live more by rule and less by impulse.  When we meet we shall talk on set topics, determined beforehand.  By this concentration we shall be able as one man or one woman to reach the human limit of cultivation, and get rid of all the aberrations of individual assertion and feeling.  By studying together in clubs, by conversing in monotone and by rule, by thinking the same things and exchanging ideas until we have none left, we shall come into that social placidity which is one dream of the nationalists—­one long step towards what may be called a prairie mental condition—­the slope of Kansas, where those who are five thousand feet above the sea-level seem to be no higher than those who dwell in the Missouri Valley.

THE DIRECTOIRE GOWN

We are all more or less devoted to ‘liberte’, ‘egalite’, and considerable ‘fraternite’, and we have various ways of showing it.  It is the opinion of many that women do not care much about politics, and that if they are interested at all in them, they are by nature aristocrats.  It is said, indeed, that they care much more about their dress than they do about the laws or the form of government.  This notion arises from a misapprehension both of the nature of woman and of the significance of dress.

Men have an idea that fashions are haphazard, and are dictated and guided by no fixed principles of action, and represent no great currents in politics or movements of the human mind.  Women, who are exceedingly subtle in all their operations, feel that it is otherwise.  They have a prescience of changes in the drift of public affairs, and a delicate sensitiveness that causes them to adjust their raiment to express these changes.  Men have written a great deal in their bungling way about the philosophy of clothes.  Women exhibit it, and if we should study them more and try to understand them instead of ridiculing their fashions as whims bred of an inconstant mind and mere desire for change, we would have a better apprehension of the great currents of modern political life and society.

Many observers are puzzled by the gradual and insidious return recently to the mode of the Directoire, and can see in it no significance other than weariness of some other mode.  We need to recall the fact of the influence of the centenary period upon the human mind.  It is nearly a century since the fashion of the Directoire.  What more natural, considering the evidence that we move in spirals, if not in circles, that the signs of the anniversary of one of the most marked periods in history should be shown in feminine apparel?  It is woman’s way of hinting what is in the air, the spirit that is abroad in the world.  It will be remembered that women took a prominent part in the destruction of the Bastile, helping, indeed, to tear down that odious structure with their own hands, the fall of