Wisconsin State Agricultural Society. 
435 
fortable and disturbed at any prospective denunciation or modifica¬ 
tion of our opinion. The plea of neglect involved in the triviality 
of the subject, is one of the soul’s deceits, by which it reserves to 
itself without intrusion, this stalking-ground of its minor amours 
and passions. 
Few themes are more important than this of dress, if we are to 
measure importance either by the labor involved, the time occupied, 
the thought occasioned, or the direct or indirect effects on charac¬ 
ter. In all these particulars, dress, among the concomitants of life, is 
chief; is the least simple and the most vexatious want. Food, shel¬ 
ter and dress are the primitive necessities, and though dress comes 
latest as least urgent, it soon, in civilized communities, presents a 
variety, importunity and constancy of claims which, all the elements 
of influence considered, make it the most productive of the three in 
personal characteristics and social effects. 
The invention of Christian communities—and Christian commu¬ 
nities as opposed to barbarous and semi-civilized ones, have no more 
obvious, ostensible mark than the multiplicity, variety and odd dis¬ 
tortion of their garments—is kept at constant tension to devise 
fresh fabrics, modify patterns, and work changing novelties into the 
web, or coloring, or form of their dress. A slight success is an in¬ 
come; a notable success, a fortune. The terms by which these pro¬ 
ducts of our ingenious, untiring and ever-changing art are desig¬ 
nated, constitute a dialect by themselves, and a fashionable periodi¬ 
cal, treating of materials and styles, is untelligible to the merely 
English scholar. Nor does the knowledge of one season answer for 
the next. Each year takes up the problem of growing complexity as 
much as possible in an independent way; and feels the fashion near¬ 
est to it only as the latest and strongest repulsion. 
A wardrobe fairly representing the fashions of our times would 
be found to touch or gather in a vast variety of industries; to 
have drawn from all nationalities, and every grade of civilization, 
and hold in leash every form of extreme service; hunters in north¬ 
ern forests and in tropical deserts, divers in the sea, Brazilian slaves, 
and needle-women, in whom highest luxury and deepest poverty 
touch each other with constant out-cry on our civilization. 
It is a common plea in behalf of luxuries that they give employ¬ 
ment to the poor and so aid them. It seems strange that as a rule 
the most costlv articles make the stingiest returns to labor. Wit- 
