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STAND UP, YE SOCIAL LIONS
Mrs. Peattie Arraigns the Sickly Forms That Sin From Nature's Rule.

A Few Clear Cut Expressions Regarding Omaha's Society In Common With That of Everywhere.

The San Francisco Arganoant, the other day, printed a London letter on the subject of the manners of the society young man of London. It was a severe but probably a just arrangement it says:
The germ of unhappiness in marriage, I believe to consist entirely in the utter luxity, not to say the brutality, of modern manners. In fact, they shine by their absences. Beyond the mechanical fact that. man lifts his hat to a lady in the street, or gets up when she leaves the room. what distressing acts of politeness is be guilty of? seventh century young man thinks he confers a favor on his hostage if he accpets her invitation to dinner, generally keeping her waiting for the answer as long as he possibly can. In case something more agreeable might happen to turn up. If he goes to a dance he takes very good care not to arrive till supper time, completely ignoring the smiling-faced. nicely gowned young ladies who are anxiously awaiting his advent He wisely avoids asking the plain daughters of the house to dance, as he labors abscense of beauty-looks upon it, indeed, as a personal insult - selects a few of the prettiest young married women for the recipients of his favors, lounges away an hour in a sitting room, takes a couple of turns in a walk, settles himself down to an excellent supper (for a smart young man never visits a house where he is not quite sure of the excellence of the cook and the wine) and walks home jauntily in the morning air, with overcoat throw around and bat poised at the back of the head in the serene confidence that he has passed a well spent evening.
Should some misguided person venture to introduce a young lady to him, however nice or attractive, he promptly, after the formality of presentation, turns on his heels and walks away.
"Such cheek!" he mutters under his breath. "to introduce a girl to me when I know such heaps of them already."
As to card-leacing after dinners or parties he considers that an exploded relic of the past. His presence at the entertainment was honor enough, and say further acknowledgment he leaves to the struggling young man who is not yet smart enough to be uncivil. A friend of mine, a mother and hostess herself half-fainting with heat and fatigue once in her early days of rhaperonage, whispered to her daughter: "Tell your partner I should like to go down to tea." To which the well-trained damsel promptly responded: "Mamma if I were to tell him that, he would never ask me to dance again!" So the patient mother had to wait until some grizzly-bearded friend of her youth, in attendance on his own daughter , took pity on her loneliness and offered her his arm.
Many and bitter are the experiences of chaperons; they must smile and smile ever on the factidious young men. and tempt them with good dinners and invitations to the theater and opera, cotent to be relagated into solitude and silence themselves. With the matronly rule, an elderly woman puts on an utter imperviousness to all the natural sensitiveness of a woman. If she is wise and effaces herself. and is content with the distnat bow from the men she has so generously entertained. she may have the satisfaction of knowing that her pretty daughters dance and enjoy their balls.
It will not do for Americans to set this down as an exclusive definition of London society, and to think heaven that we are not as they are for, by the most incontestibly correct evidence, our own society is no better. Mr. Ward McAllister, writing in the Sunday World of New York, says that soceity is the gay, fashionable element from the upper 10.000. He assures us that it must have larger proportions than mere wealth confers. It must have strife, and contention, and jealousy, and envy to be brilliant. It's motto is, "I go you once better." That is , if a society man gives a dinner, all other society must give a better one. If a society woman appears spledidly dressed all other society women must possess a proper envy and appear yet more richly attired. This is brialliancy - so Mr.McAllister says-and society. It is safe to believe that he has not been trying to be satirical. He has indeed, been historically accurate. Society, which owes its cohesiveness in a love of fashion, is as it has been described above.
When one touches upon Omaha society, one touches a tender point. There are so many persons in it who are there almost by force of circumstances, and whose hearts are warm, and their lives pure and useful in spite of their connection with a body that aspires to be purely fashionable, that one hesitates to relapse into unkind generalization that it is as yet new, flexible, and uniformed. it is not confirmed in the worser vices of its kind. Hut it already possesses much of which there is cause to be ashamed.
The manners of many of the young men here are no better than those described in the London letter quoted above. it is a well known fact, and one hears it whispered everywhere. that hardly one of the parties and balls of the winter has been a success. owing to the fact that the young men would not dance, nor talk, nor pay attention to the young ladies, nor do anything that a gentleman is expected to do on a gala occasion. They have stood around the doors in stupid groups, looking cynical-or trying to do so-and discussing, without much interest, who, arrayed for their approval, and lauched out into society for their allurement, have endeavored in vain to make themselves attractive.
Perhaps is it not the young men, so much as society, that is wrong. There has always been, and always will be, something almost shameless in the cold-blooded putting up of a young girl into the matromonial market. The coarseness of it is dusguised. to be sure. It is an immemorial custom to begin with , and most folks are apt to think a thing venerable because it is old. It is surrounded by a glamour of elegance, happiness and youth. But if the facts are plainly presented they show that the entrance of a young girl into the society is the formal admission of her readiness for marriage. The young men-certainly think of it so. They have the arrogance of suitans, the synicism of roues -although they are not such-they know they are expected to compare, examine and select. They knw that the money so prodigally spent, the dinners, balls, costumes, carriages, flowers, wines, ceremoies and all the nameless elaborations of soceity are for their benefit in a way. And it is little wonder that they become rapidly spoiled, or that they do not show proper respect for the mothers who thus flaunt their daughters, or the daughters who prink and pose for their benefit.
It would seem as if any woman who posessed so beautiful and dear a charge as a daughter - a girl woman- would spend her best efforts in trying to protect her daughter from the inquisitorial glances the degrading irivoloty, the envy, mallice, treachery and contentious of society. One would think that pride would insist that the daughter should be sought and not that she should be set up in the public place for view. One would imagine that the more a mother had traveled, studied and posessed, the more relined would be her heart, and the more desirous she would be of teaching her daughter to put humanity before society, the delights of learning before those of flirting, and the preservation of health before gayety. Think what a pitiful exchange all this is for happy home life. I do not want to be sour and absurd. I would not think of denying any wholesome pleasure to the young. I think young men and women should be much together. But when society interfered with them. but when it introduces the chaperon on this peculiar way that it does, when it throws young men and women together under such conditions that both are forced to think of the materialistic side of a matrimonial union, then it seems to be that the sweetness of youth, and love, and life is deliberately taken from them.
No one supposes for a moment that these young men and women want to be competitors in expediture, or that they desire to be meanly critical, or to give up the best things of life for the tiresome round of noisy gatherings where people clamor like peacocks and eat half melted ices and olly salads. Not at all. They are forced into it all, and only now said then is there one who,having the money and position which enables or her to enter society, has the courage and peculiarity to renounce it all and to live the unselfish instead of the selfish life.
The idea that society polishes the manners of the young if only truth with deception, kindness with perness, gentleness with bluster, and politeness with arragnace. Society, so far as I know, does not teach veneration for the aged, love of parents, love of learning, love of humanity sympathy for the unfortunate, beauty of thought, or the brotherhood of man, I have seen all the graces of manner possessed by the home-brought up boy to an equal extent with the society-developed boy. And I think the training and the manners of the home have a much more formative effect than society upon the manners of the young, so far as the improving of them goes.
A large part of the Omaha naturally felt a good deal of wonder the wonder the other day that the more fashionable part of our community should have turned out in its very best clothes, spent an enormous amount of money and exerted itself in every way, to listen to the bad playing and worse singing of the Yale Glee club. It seems to me that there can be little doubt that the reason was the opportunity offered to the young ladies, for once, to have partners in the dance, and children who might by some remote chance, become suitors. Certainly, the enthusiasm about those well-dressed byt very artistic young men needs an explanation. When Omaha has had the opportunity of listening to fine music. It has frequently refused to take advantage of it. By the expenditure of a small amount of money it might now keep in the city a band of excellent musicians, who would like to settle here if there is any chance of their earning a living. But so far as known no one has bidden a welcome to these talented musical students. These men who have studied under the best masters of Gernmany remain here without a cordial hand being extended to them although they have it in their power to make our evenings beautiful with music such as we have never had here. We neglect them and spend thousands on these somewhat impertinent young Yale men who travel around the country under the false pretense of being musicians. At a time when our honest and industructions workingmen, are, with their families undergoing cruelest privations, we let all of that money go out of the town. I must say that it looks bad society it shows a low average of intellect in that body, and a disregard of the sacred responsibilities of citizenship.
I do not feel inclines to mitigate these remarks by looking for the excuses which might be discovered for such foolishness. It seems to me that these minigating facts are feeble to be mentioned.
Society must, if it would show a reason for existence, have some dignity about it, and some brains. It must have other things in common besides champagne and jack pots. it must not ask guests to its houses to fleece them out of their money at the beguilin poker table. It can never lay claim to hospitality while it does this. It must not permit its yuoung girls to drink so much champagne that they have to be cared for by their friends. There is no use in pretending that society has elegant ladies while some of the disgrace is like that. It must not have it it persons who owe their grocers while they buy diamonds and who freeze the grocer's collectors with frigin stares and rebunking voice till the poor man cringingly apologizes for existences.
All this sort of thing may do over in Euprose, but it isn't what we want here, in the country we all love and would beautify with fine acts. We do not complain because society is elegant, or rich, or refined or well dressed or courtly, SO far as it is these things it is to be commended. Would we all possessed these good things. But in so far as it is coarse, stupid, dishonest, of low taste, mercenary, selfish and ill-bred we do not condemm it. We condemn the young men here who do not even thank their hostesses for the money and effort they expend in entertaining them, and warn them that the edict has already gone forth from some of the reality best houses in town that they will be punished for their boorish manners by not being entertained there any more. We condemn the young girls for their ridiculone affections their atterly inane exchange of flatteries and their belittling conversation. We condemn the men for their pretension - which they cannopt afford and for which the tradesman suffer. We condemn the women for their rivaliries to which they incite their daughters and the coarse ideas they implant in those young minds. We condemn them for not impressing upon their daughters any of the responisibilities and doties of life. for not looking after their hearts and minds as well as their bodies.
Society-the more leisurely part of us-could help us all if it would. Why is it false so its trust? Why does it set us poor examples? Why are its manners bad and its tongue sharp, and its act selfish?
Elia W. Peattie.

WOULD NOT TALK POLITICS.
Hon. Brad Slaughter Turns Interviewer - Result Not Satisfactory.
Lion, Brad Slaughter is a pretty good sort of a man from a reporter's standpoint, but when a World-Herald man ran accorss him in the Millard hotel office Friday night he was "no good." His stated positively that he had no news, did not want to talk politics, and turning interviewer himself the following coversation ensued.
"A man told me in Lincoln the other day that Rosewater was mayor of Omaha. Is that correct?"
"It is so stated on good authority."
"And they say he is not making a very satisfactory one. Is he going to be impeached?"
"You will have to ask a prophet, or wait awhile for an answer."
"What is going to become of the gamblers?"
"I don't know."
"Well, what is the World-Herald going to do with the chattel martgage sharks?"
Ising emThen Mr. Slaughter admitted that he thought State Suditor Moore had been a little previous" in jumping onto State Treasurer Bartley and saying his books were not correct , also that he could not give the exact date when Omaha people will have the pleasure of reading the first issue of a straight republican paper published at home. He added:
"I am very sorry, very sorry indeed, to that all was not peace and harmony among our populist friends at their listings convention. On the newspaper propisition I see that though the convention decided the populist daily should be issued at Kearney the editor of the populist weekly published here announced that he would establish a daily in Omaha. Well, may God have mercy on him, is all I have to say. "

KEEP 'EM AT HOME.
Proceesings to Consel County Justuces to Give Up City Offices.
The legal fight to determine whether justices of the peace elected in country precints can come into the city and set branch establishments or be compelled to keep their office and transact their business exculsively in the precinct when elected was carried into the courts yesterday.
The case is entitled the state of Nebraska on the realtion of V.O. Strickler against C. W. Edgertonm and is an application for a mandanics to counsel the defendant to keep his office in West Omaha precint. In and for which he was elected. Edfterton keeps an office at 1216 Farnam Street, in this city. There has been a great deal of dissatisfaction, not only among the city justices, who claim that their business is inferred with by these outside justices, but the attorneys, who have had great big and tall kicks on account of the manner in which business is done by them. The proceedings against Edgerton are commenced by the attorneysl who are dissatisfied with the present state of afairs.
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