forth in the social battle's magnificently stern array, our hearts render
them the homage due to the brave. When we consider how complex their
military equipment has grown, we fancy each of these self-devoted mothers
to be an Arnold Winkelried, receiving in her martyr-breast the points of a
dozen different cards, and shouting, "Make way for liberty!" For is it not
securing liberty to have cleared off a dozen calls from your list, and
found nobody at home?

If this sort of thing goes on, who can tell where the paper warfare shall
end? If ladies may leave cards for their husbands, who are never seen out
of Wall Street, except when they are seen at their clubs; or for their
sons, who never forsake their billiards or their books,--why can they not
also leave them for their ancestors, or for their remotest posterity? Who
knows but people may yet drop cards in the names of the grandchildren whom
they only wish for, or may reconcile hereditary feuds by interchanging
pasteboard in behalf of two hostile grandparents who died half a century
ago?

And there is another social observance in which the introduction of the
card system may yet be destined to save much labor,--the attendance on
fashionable churches. Already, it is said, a family may sometimes reconcile
devout observance with a late breakfast, by stationing the family carriage
near the church-door--empty. Really, it would not be a much emptier
observance to send the cards alone by the footman; and doubtless in the
progress of civilization we shall yet reach that point. It will have many
advantages. The _effete_ of society, as some cruel satirist has called
them, may then send their orisons on pasteboard to as many different
shrines as they approve; thus insuring their souls, as it were, at several
different offices. Church architecture may be simplified, for it will
require nothing but a card-basket. The clergyman will celebrate his solemn