The attempt made in certain corners of New York “Society” to introduce the foreign system of chaperonage is one of the most absurd and incongruous efforts at aping foreign fashions (which are on the decline even in Europe) ever witnessed in our midst. In Europe Chaperonage is in so far excusable, as it is a modified survival from barbarous times when men were mostly brutes, being drunk half the time and on military expeditions the other half. To treat American men, who are brought up as gentlemen, and commonly behave as such, as mediæval ruffians, is a gratuitous insult, which they ought to resent by avoiding those houses where Oriental experiments are being tried with the daughters. That would bring the “mammas” to reason very soon. Yet it would seem as if New York “Society” had already had enough of the Oriental experiment; for the same high authority just quoted asserted last autumn that “A regular stampede in favour of the liberty of the young unmarried female is to be undertaken this winter by a number of ‘three-years-in-society’ veterans, supported and encouraged by nearly all this seasons _débutantes_. The first step is to be the establishment of a right on the part of young girls to form parties for theatre _matinées_ and afternoon concerts, untrammelled by the presence of even a matron of their own age, and to which all ‘reliable and well-behaved young men are to be eligible.’... Rule No. 2 establishes beyond all dispute the often-mooted question whether the presence of a brother and sister in a party of young people going to any place of evening amusement throws a shield of respectability over the others of the party. Society long ago frowned upon this mongrel kind of chaperonage; but upon the principle that no young man would permit indiscretions or improprieties in a party of which his sister made one, the ‘veterans’ have voted in favour of it. The young man with a sister is therefore to enact the part of dragon on these occasions, and will be largely in demand. Failing a convenient sister, he may get a cousin, perhaps, to take her place.” When it comes to the cousin, the reversion to Americanism, pure and simple, will be complete.