Page:Free Opinions, Freely Expressed on Certain Phases of Modern Social Life and Conduct.djvu/127

 sanctions and a sacrilegious yoke, thus rendering avarice the source of credulity. In fine, they have corrupted every idea of good and evil, just and unjust, virtue and vice; they have misled nations in a labyrinth of calamity and mistake. Ignorance and the love of accumulation! These are the malevolent beings that have laid waste the earth; these are the decrees of fate that have overturned empires; these are the celestial maledictions that have struck these walls, once so glorious, and converted the splendour of populous cities into a sad spectacle of ruins!"

Laughable, yet grievous, is the childish conduct of many American plutocrats who are never tired of announcing in the daily Press that they are spending Three Thousand Pounds on roses for one afternoon's "At Home," or Five Thousand Pounds on one single banquet! After this, why should we call the Roman Heliogabalus a sensualist and voluptuary? His orgies were less ostentatious than many social functions of to-day. It is not, we believe, recorded that he paid any "fashion-papers" (if there were any such in the Roman Empire) to describe his "Feasts of Flowers," though a lively American lady, giving out her "social experiences" recently at an "Afternoon tea" said gaily: "I always send an account of my dinners, my dresses, and the dresses of my friends to 'The ' with a cheque. Otherwise, you know, I should never get myself or my parties mentioned at all!" One is bound to entertain the gravest doubts as to the truth of her assertion, knowing, of course, that of all institutions in the world, the Press, in Great Britain at any rate, is