CERTAIN AREAS OF OUR SEAMY SIDE
THE thrifty person who attends, uninvited, a wedding reception and, retiring early from the festivities, leaves the unhappy couple poorer by a few unconsidered trifles of jewelry has a just claim to the gratitude of mankind. The interests of justice demand his immunity from detection: the officer who shall molest him is hostis humani generis. Neither grave rebuke nor ridicule has sufficed to overcome and stamp out the vulgar custom of ostentatiously displaying wedding presents, with names of givers attached; perhaps it will yield to the silent suasion of the sneak-thief. To healthy and honest understandings—that is to say, to the understandings of this present writer and those who have the intelligence to think as he does—it is but faintly conceivable how self-respecting persons can do this thing. Display of any kind is necessarily repugnant to those tastes which distinguish the well-bred from those whose worth is of another sort. Among the latter we are compelled (reluctantly) to reckon those amiable beings who display coats-of-arms, crests and the like, whether they are theirs by inheritance, purchase or invention; those, we mean, who blazon them about in conspicuous places for the obvious purpose of declaring with emphasis whatever merits and advantages may inhere in their possession. In this class, also, we must place the excellent ladies and gentlemen who “boast” their descent from illustrious, or merely remote, ancestors. (The remoter the ancestor—that is to say, the less of his blood his descendant has—the greater that funny person’s pride in the distinction.) A person of sense would be as likely to direct attention to his own virtues as to those of his forefathers; a woman of modesty, to her own beauty or grace as to the high social position of her grandmother.
Nay, we must carry our condemnation to an even greater extreme. The man who on public occasions covers his breast with decorations, the insignia of orders, the badges of high service or of mere distinction such as results from possession of the badge, is guilty of immodesty. “Why do you not wear your Victoria Cross?” the only recipient of it who ever failed to wear it was asked. “When I wish people to know how valiant I am in battle,” was the reply, “I will tell them.”
But below this lowest deep of vanity there is a lower deep of cupidity—and something more. The custom of displaying wedding presents duly labeled with the givers’ names and publishing the list in the newspapers supplies a very “genteel” method of extortion to those who have conscientious scruples against highway robbery. That extortion is very often the conscious intent I am far from affirming; but that such is the practical effect many a reader inadequately provided with this world’s goods will pause at this point feelingly to aver. But he is a lofty soul indeed if at the next silent demand he do not stand and deliver as meekly as heretofore. Looked at how one may please, it is a bad business, not greatly superior in point of morality to that of the sneak-thief who is one of its perils, and with whose intelligent activity its existence may, one hopes, become in time altogether incompatible.