Rensselaer Republican, Volume 15, Number 13, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 December 1882 — A Great Deal in Hats. [ARTICLE]

A Great Deal in Hats.

But leaving minor points about hats for larger ones, what a wonderful amount of a man’s respectability vests in his hats! To try the experiment, lose your hat over the bridge on a windy day and Avalk a few blocks without one. All the rest of your clothes will not save you from the personalities of the juvenile public, nor the unconcealed ridicule of the adult. It is no use to stop and remind the street boys that Julius Caesar never wore anything on his heatd. If you put your umbrella up you only make things worse. The man who lost his hat is the general joke of the moment. Mobs, therefore, hate hats. For mobs hate respectabillity and all the signs of it. In public speaking they are a very important feature. They are the orator’s weakest point. It is a fierce light that beats on a candidate’s hat. There is a loadstone in it that attracts old eggs and rotten oranges. Even dead cats have been known to display the most unusual ferocity at the sight of one. I remember when I was traveling in Ireland (as a correspondent) with Messrs. Parnell, Dillon, and Davitt, seeing a cat, though notoriously, indeed outrageously defunct, escaped from the grip of its possessor and, traversing the interval between that person and the platform, knock off the speaker’s hat. Mr. Parnell, with characteristic sagacity, generally spoke hatless. He understood mobs and and was anxious to economize his hat, but one day (it was at Enniscarthy) the mob was so infuriated by his conduct that they tried to snatch a paltry compensation in the honorable gentleman’s trousers. They got hold of his leg and pulled it through the railings but, Mr. Parnell’s suspenders proved equal to the strain and the mob was baffled. And here lies a difficulty, for if a public man keeps his hat on, the mob is liable to take it off violently; whereas if he puts it out of sight an exasperated public may thirst for his shirt. Nothing so disconcerts or deranges a man so rapidly and so completely as the loss of his hat or even liberties being taken with it. In an altercation at a street corner the hatless one is always set down by lookers-on as being in the wrong, and the police .does not hesitate to pronounce him either drunk or disorderly,’ or both.