Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 September 1884 — The Social Pillar Sham. [ARTICLE]

The Social Pillar Sham.

I have just returned from a long and pleasant reunion and two-handed reminiscence with an old time friend, whose face I had not seen for nearly twenty years, i During that time he has been in the penitentiary, and I, having been more discreet, have been less hampered. Thus our paths have led us through different walks of life. At least, mine has. —« ——. — We were comparing notes yesterday, and, among other things, the conversation drifted toward the subject of real and apparent wealth. My friend, prior to his retirement, had been engaged in the wholesale burgling trade and general grand-larceny business, and his experience had sharpened his judgment and.knowledge of human nature. I call to mind, now, several of his maxims. Among others, he made it a rule never to follow a man very far who bought strawberries in January. He said that wealthy people were not the ones yvho bought the highest-priced seats to hear Patti, or ate green peas for Christinas. It is the James Crow aristocrat and nickle-plated social favorite with the tinfoil-back diamond in his only shirt who buys things because they are high, and gets side-tracked at Sing Sifig, with ten years for repentance. I wish that I had a voice like a foghorn, that I might sit on the corner of a cloud and proclaim to the world that the man who sits up nights to knock his neighbors cold with envy is liable to get a chance to recover his lost sleep under the gentle guardianship of the State and the statutes in such cases made and provided. - Fewer people are actually fooled by hand-me-down pomp than is generally surmised. Thosewhohave arrived at years of discretion, as a general rule, call to mind from twenty-seven to thir-ty-nine people in their own horizon who have sought to get there, but stepped on something while in transit, and fell with a sickening thud. This should teach us to be what we seem. Only a few months ago a young man who occupied a sls seat at the opera fainted, and when they carried him out and worked over him some time, and they were beginning to be alarmed and overhauled him a little, they found that his shirt-bosom was pinned to his vest, and that his cuffs were pinned to the inside of the sleeves of his spike-tailed coat, because there was nothing else to pin to, and he only wore one sock ! Little do we know the actual suffering that is going on all around us. Do you think it hurts my sensitive nature to be frowned upon by the proud and haughty milkman’s alternate, as he rudely jostles me on his way to the dress-circle, while I joyously climb to the peanut-gallery, softly humming to myself “Empty is the Cradle, Baby’s Gone,” or a bar from some other great oratorio? Not exactly. lam not sensitive in thaF way. I could sell a block of stock in my New Jerusalem mine, and borrow a breech-loading spy-glass, and sit in the bald-headed row myself, if I wanted to; but I’d rather not occupy a seat in a mixed company. I’d rather sit among business-suits that are paid for than swallow-tails that will have to be returned next day. I may be peculiar that way. Perhaps it's plebeian and vulgar, but it’s comfortable. Really, we need as much reform in society as we do in politics. If I hadn’t so much to attend to myself, I’d organize a two-dollar reform in this line; and I have no doubt that, with my brilliant social record and personal magnetism, I could elevate society several degrees Fahrenheit.Society is too apt to infer that the riff-raff and the common herd are fooled and blinded by the glare and glitter of rented clothes and jewelry. On behalf of the riff-raff and common herd, I desire to state that we are not. We find that by wearing blue-glass goggles we can outglare a diamond as big as a cut glass ink-stand. Let us remember that clothes do not make the man. It is the head and heart that makes the man; though of course, he should see that he has a good, light-running and durable liver. He ought also to have a stomach which will not crave watermellons in January, and snow birds in August, at thirty days.— Bill Eye, in Puck. ; . . .