TIME MACHINE ... 1878- "THE STRAIN UPON MODERN LIVING"

ACROSS THE USA

December, 1878

(The New York Times)

THE STRAIN UPON MODERN LIVING

(Excerpts)

Every man for himself is emphatically the modern sentiment, and there are some signs of completing this declaration of independence by adding the clause "Every woman for herself, also."

What is more clear than the fact that now no family is left to itself and to its own traditions and habits, but that the most out-of-the-way homes, whether in the backwoods or on the distant coast, are within reach of the world's vast and intense life, and no strangers to its hopes and fears, its learning and its folly, its triumphs and its disasters.

Not only every family that takes a newspaper, but every person who hears the village gossip, knows what is going on all over the globe, and every man who has to buy or sell anything, has cause to revise his estimates from day to day; and very often men lose their appetite for their breakfast by news from the great market of America or Europe that prices have changed sadly to their hurt. A considerable proportion of pain goes with the news of the day, and a large portion of unwholesomness, for disasters and scandals are dwelt upon with more minuteness than successes and satisfactions, and no great bargains or great weddings are reported half as fully as great frauds and great divorce and scandals.

It is not remarkable that the rich and conspicuous should strive to outshine each other in dress and living, but the remarkable thing is that in our modern life there are now no radical distinctions of class or fortune in costume or habits, and that all persons, and especially all women, follow the same fashions as far as they can, and catch the course of the same social ambition. So far as street dress is concerned, the wives, and especially the daughters, of the poorer classes, make, relatively, far more display than their richer neighbors, and to a certain extent, the exactions of modern society are in the inverse proportion of means and abilities, since they who have least fortune and talent are subject to the same high pressure from the reigning mode, and women who are not usually trained to earn their own living are beset by the same ruling passion for dress and ornament.

The palace of merchants and bankers, and the cottages of farmers and mechanics among us have a similar story to tell. Indeed it may be set down as part of the universal strain on modern living, that its exactions are out of proportion to its means, and the exaction presses upon every family, while the means at hand vary from wealth, or what is called competency, down to limitation and want.

Surely our modern living is under great strain, and many lives break down beneath the pressure.