Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 December 1894 — Grave Question for a Statesman. [ARTICLE]

Grave Question for a Statesman.

“Imagine Senator Evarts, Senator Sherman, or any other of your most grave, dignified, and revered statesmen being called upon to decide the question as to whether, when a lady rides on a tandem bicycle with a male escort she should sit behind or in front!” exclaims Vogue’s Paris correspondent. “Yet this is the problem which has been seriously propounded to the venerable Senator Jules Simon; to the pompous and intensely dignified Comte de Haussonville, who'represented the Comte de Paris’ intere->ts here and was his principal lieutenant: to the portly Duke of Doudeauville: and to the octogenarian, Senator Barthelmy St. Hilaire. They have, after due consideration, responded to the inquiry with the same gravity with which it was put to them, and with as much unction as if they were determining some intricate prob’em of statecraft or ecclesiastical lore. 1 need scarcely say that their unanimous deci ion was that the lady t hould sit in front, since she is bound to prefer the green horizons and the varieties of the landscape to the back of a man, while the latter, for his part, ought to prefer to the beauties of the landscape and the poesy of the horizon the little crisp curls that grow in the nape of every pretty woman’s neck. Y’et it is easy to understand why this decision should be declined by the majority of the bicyclists, especially those of my own sex. For it is in the nape of the neck and at the base of the skull where a woman first begins to manifest signs of her age, where her beauty shows its first token of waning, and the fair one must be very young and sure of her loveliness in order to place herself for hours at a time in the manner that shows her under the most trying arcumstances to her escort.”