The Long and Short of it.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 11, 13 March 1902, Page 1

The Long and Short of it.

The Apostle declared that the glory of a woman is in her hair. A good deal of man's stock of the same quality resided in the same quarter until these latter and more hurried days when he began to career over the surface of the earth with a sandpapered poll stuck into a hat of the chimney-pot or the • boxer' type. In olden days the bard roamed through the land, Loose hie beard, and hoary hair Streamed, like a meteor, to the troubled air. So late as the days of Charles 11. and Queen Anne, and well on into the Georgian era, lank-haired men and men with a natural head-covet ing <as thick as a patch of gorse, alike eked out nature's tresses with huge wigs that fell in curly cataracts of corkscrew ringlets on their shoulders. Our judges and barristers still follow the ancient custom. Th,e pig-tail ofNelson's days was a similar survival. Our male artists and poets and music professors still wear a sort of natural counterpart of the old bob-wig. The American Indian braves still stick to the ancient fashion of our race, and wear their jet-black locks in graceful ' falls ' about their copper-colored necks. But Commissioner Jones, of Indian affairs, has just promulgated an ukase compelling the Indians in the realms of Uncle Sam to shear their locks and keep them shorn. And people are beginning to think that it is- about time that the Republican party in the United States removed their pet donkeys from office and attended to more serious concerns than arranging the toilets of the Red Man by legal enactment. * Except in the case of convicts and such-like gentry, no State regulation has ever been in force in Australia or New Zealand regulating either the male or female fashion of wearing the hair. Such things may be safely left to settle themselves, and the male fashion in heads among us is rapidly evolving towards a trimming which reproduces the shape of the Aberdeen turnip. Well, nature, after all, generally knows what she is about —and this is chiefly a Scottish community. The Anglo-Norman law of 1295 against the wearing of long tresses (called the coulin) by Irishmen gave rise to the Bardic song of ' The Coulin,' one of the sweetest in the country's literature. America began early to legislate about coifs and curls and flowing tresses. The New England Puritans could not abide, especially in women, those wiles of Satan. Perchance they felt, as Pope did at a later day, that Fair tresses man's imperial race insnare, And beauty draws us with a single hair. They fined tennis-players twenty-five shillings for each • offence' ; they forbade smoking as vigorously as James I. of England —or as the Wahabee Arabs, who regard tobaccopuffing and idolatry as the unforgiveable sins; they regulated the cut of coats, the shape of skirts, the ' poke of bonnets; but they made things particularly lively for be-wigged men and women that dared to wear their tresses as God and nature made them. In Massachusetts the magistrates declared that the wearing of long hair was ' contrary to the rule of God's word, which says it is a shame for a man to wear long hair,'

and that it was also 'a thing uncivil and unmanly.' And they called upon the elders to exercise vigilance so that tfie church members 'be not defiled therewith.' This, however, did not seem to have had a sufficiently satisfactory result. Sterner action was deemed necessary, and in 1675 the Grand Jury was empowered to hale before the courts 'such men openly appearing amongst us in long hair like women's hair, either their own or others' hair made into periwigs.' They were likewise ordered to hale before the courts all ' women wearing borders of hair,' and all who practise ' cutting, curling, immodest laying out their hair, which practice,' they add, ' doth prevail and increase, especially among the younger. But fashion overcame the stringency of repressive legislation, and periwigs and ' borders of hair,' and ' cutting, curling,' 1 and such-like vanities were almost as common in New England by the close of the seventeenth century as they were in Britain and France.