Jasper County Democrat, Volume 5, Number 24, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 September 1902 — HENRY SCORES THE “400.” [ARTICLE]

HENRY SCORES THE “400.”

Henry Watterson, the famous editor of the equally famed Louisville Courier Journal, a few days ago referred to New York’s “Four hundred” in a two column editorial in which he classed them as a flock of unclean birds. He said in part: “The term ‘Smart Set’ was adopted by society to save itself from a more odious description. The distinguishing trait of the ‘smart set,’ is its moral abandon. It makes a business of defying and overleaping conventional restraints upon its pleasures and amusements. It sets itself above the law, both human and divine. “Its women are equally depraved with its men. They know all the dirt the men know. They talk freely with the men of things forbidden the decent and virtuous. They read the worst French fiction. They see the worst French plays. “The women of this smart set no longer pretend to recognize virtue, even as a female accomplishment. Innocence is a badge of delinquency, a sign of the crude and raw. a deformity which if tolerated at all, must carry some promise of amendment, for among these titled cyprians the one thing needful is to know it all. “In London and Paris and at Monte Carlo in the winter, and at Trouville and Aix in the summer, they make life one unending debauch; their only literary provender when they read at all, the creeds of D’Annunzio and Bourget; their Mecca, the roulette table and the race course; their Heaven, the modern yact with its luxuries and isolation. The ocean tells no tales and, as the smart set knows no law, in extremes it can go to sea. “The 400 are rotten, through and through. They have not one redeeming feature. All their ends are achieved by money and largely by the misuse of money.