FULL BEARDS AMD RED PETTICOATS.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume VIII, Issue 2488, 30 December 1886, Page 2

FULL BEARDS AMD RED PETTICOATS.

People who can remember'badrof the civil war must know that shaving was almost universal in. those days, and that when the contrary practice began it soagitated, that tho newspapers were filled with leading articles on "The Beard Movement" and " The Moustache Movement." Probably the most of our older readers can remember when they first saw a preacher in'the pulpit, wearing s moustache and the shook it gave them. It was, if possible, worse than that sacri* legious act/of bringing fiddles into the choir. Tho event which BtarteMlio beard movement was the visit of the wonderful Hungarian oratcr, Louis Kossuth, who was extreme and picturesque in &JL nil beard and moustache, and soft fe]#haji and curling feather. Ho tho soft hat as well as he travelled over" the country in 1854 and 1855 and spoke everywhere to great crowds, whom he powerfully impressed with the masterly English which he had learned from the Bible, Shakespeare, and Webster's Dictionary while he lay in an Austrian prison, he advertised both his hair and his hat very widely. It would Beem rather trivial now-a-days for tho news-" papers to gravely discuss the "beard movement," but that was' not the mesfc trivial thing with which the newspapers of 30 years ago busied themselves. Prominent among their themes shMfr before the war was "Theßed Petfctojwb Movement." .It became the sensible fashion for women to wear red flanuel petticoats instead of white cotton ones which' had been the universal wear before. This was an innovation that worried the nowipapers seriously. Many of them held the red garment to be, if not immodest, at least bold and flaunting, and a symptom of the degeneracy of the age. CJwrlos Mackay,. then visiting 111 this.OTitry, published an earnest poetical apMfcl for '■ the white, the modest potticpat,*hlch went the entire round, of; tho' press.— Buffalo Express.