And it came to pass that there was a
great War. And there was also a Russian Revolution, greater than the
French one. And it may be that everything will be changed,
fundamentally and soon. Or it may be merely that Sir John will say to
his Lady, `My dear, I have decided that the footmen shall not wear
powder, and not wear livery, any more,' and that his Lady will say
`Oh, all right.' Then at length will the Eighteenth Century vanish
altogether from the face of the earth.
Some of the shallower historians would have us believe that powder is
deleterious to the race of footmen. They point out how plenteously
footmen abounded before 1790, and how steadily their numbers have
declined ever since. I do not dispute the statistics. One knows from
the Table Talk of Samuel Rogers that Mr. Horne Tooke, dining te^te-a`-
te^te with the first Lord Lansdowne, had counted so many as thirty
footmen in attendance on the meal. That was a high figure--higher than
in Rogers' day, and higher far, I doubt not, than in ours. What I
refuse to believe is that the wearing of powder has caused among
footmen an ever-increasing mortality. Powder was forced on them by
their employers because of the French Revolution, but their subsequent
fewness is traceable rather to certain ideas forced by that Revolution
on their employers.
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