Additional Papers. 325 



m'ost label every garment with the date of purchase, and yet with bon- 

 nets there is standard of beauty that fashion cannot change. "Among 

 the ancients," says Lessing in his scholarly analysis of the Laocoon, 

 "beauty was the supreme law of the imitative art. The Greek artist 

 represented nothing that was not beautiful. Pain in its disfiguring ex- 

 treme was not compatible with beauty. Keenness of sympathy," the 

 great writer adds, "the dreadful thought of our own annihilation, makes 

 a dead body in nature an object of aversion." If millinery is an art, and 

 it certainly is, is a dead bird a legitimate means of garniture? Is that 

 which suggests suffering and death, an "object of beauty or of aversion?" 

 Is the flagrant violation of a long established standard of beauty the 

 fault of merchant or of buyer? Supply is always indicative of demand. 

 Many milliners denounce the custom of wearing birds as barbarous and 

 cue that should be abolished. As long as there is a demand for this 

 so-called decoration, sentiment will be ignored, economics disregarded, 

 the sensibilities of others wounded, and the balance of nature disturbed. 

 Women can no longer afford to encourage this wrong. 



•What does it cost, this garniture of death? 

 It costs the life which God alone can give ; 

 It costs dull silence where was music's breath; 

 It costs dead joy that foolish pride may live. 

 Ah, life, and Joy, and song, depend upon it. 

 Are costly trimmings for a woman's honnet':' 



From no standpoint can woman afford to perpetuate this fashion. 

 The mother, her child a fledgling in the nest, cannot challenge the 

 criticism of being at least thoughtless, if not indifferent. The wife of 

 the farmer can ill afford to indulge in that which if preserved will in- 

 crease her husband's income; for millions of dollars are lost to" agri- 

 culture every year through harmful insects that birds destroy. The 

 devotee to beauty can hardly wish to show disregard, if not ignorance, 

 of an imperative and fundamental law of beauty. The maiden teaching 

 her Sabbath class of love and mercy has no desire to weaken precept 

 b}' example. 



Many women are ignorant of the cruelty that fashion sometimes 

 institute. They do not always know that the delicate, airy little tuft 

 or plume they so much admire, and call the aigrette, is obtained at a 

 great and cruel sacrifice of life. 



Mr. Earl Dodge Scott, curator of the Department of Ornithology in 

 Princeton University, says in his interesting book : "The Story of a 

 Bird Lover's Life," concerning the aigrette that "the time, when the 

 several kinds of herons, known as egrets, wear their decorative plumes 

 is coincident with the nuptial season. Then nature adds to their charm 

 and beauty these superb decorations. They are w^orn only for a brief 

 period, perhaps six weeks or two months, and during all this interval 



