Albuquerque Evening Herald

WOMAN AND HER RAIMENT.

A decision of interest to many husbands has been handed down by Vice Chancellor Garrison of the Jersey City, N. J. court of chancery. Summarized it is to the effect that the utmost extent to which a man can be asked to go in supplying his wife with outer clothing is $20 for a suit, $15 for a coat, $4 for a pair of shoes, and $1 for a pair of corsets.

"It is common," the vice chancellor added by way of comment, "for women to spend $75 or $100 for a suit of clothes with which to go to bridge parties, and cause their sisters to turn green with envy. But it is no part of a husband's duty to provide the means of causing other women unhappiness."

The decision will be held a righteous one by most men in the world, and there is at least one woman who decries her sex's boundless love of fine, of luxurious, of unstinted raiment. Miss Ida M. Tarbell in a recent book finds that the complication of woman's life by the domination of clothes is "extremely serious." In many cases it becomes not one of the sides of her business, but the business of her life.

However, the condition is not new. The majority of women always have craved fine raiment, and man has been obliged to do the best he could to supply it. Napoleon allowed his pleasure loving empress, Josephine, $50,000 a year for her toilet. It was a munificent but insufficient sum; Josephine spent, on an average, some $250,000 a year. That seems hard to beat, even in our plain democracy, yet it has been asserted that one woman in American society bought last summer in Europe half a dozen night gowns, for which she paid $1,000 apiece.

There has been noted, too, the exceptional case of duties of more than $50,000 paid on personal articles by a New York woman, who yearly brings over similar articles of jewelry and clothes. This amount in duty represents an expenditure of about $300,000. And in California there was the case the other day of a fortunate heiress who returned from the east with almost half a million dollars worth of finery.

This is no man's business, of course, except when he has to pay the bills. And with the New Jersey vice chancellor's decision before him he may not be so inclined to pay so much hereafter. At any rate, it may be hazarded that no amount of the costliest raiment can make a coarse woman beautiful, and that the same raiment, instead of enhancing the loveliness of a sweet and simple beauty, frequently spoils it.