We have failed so far to develop standards of taste, fitness, and quality, strong, sure, and good enough effectually to impose themselves.

There is no national taste in dress; there is only admirable skill in adapting fashions made in other countries.

There is no national sense of restraint and proportion.

It is pretty generally agreed that getting all you can is entirely justifiable.

There is no national sense of quality; even the rich to-day in this country wear imitation laces.
The effect of all this is a bewildering restlessness in costume--a sheeplike willingness to follow to the extreme the grotesque and the fantastic.