diplomacy, which at once betrays and conceals each new adjustment of social forces, and advertises us of the character and strength of those with whom we have to deal. Dress is often far more the language of the tastes and passions, than language itself, and this dumb show of colors may reveal the inner life more clearly than the chit-chat which accompanies it, and makes way for it. Indeed, the reason why speech is put to so light service in fashionable society, is, because the whole substance of the heart's message has gone into the brilliant dress, has found another and more adequate utter ance. Dress, issuing thus out of the secret and hidden character of a life it most strikingly embodies and presents, offered in turn to eyes alert and sensibilities alive with sympathetic comprehension, moulds the inner nature and outward action of those who most concern themselves with it to a degree not at once comprehended by the phlegmatic, forgetful male-mind, awakened for a moment to its effects at remote intervals; and then only to transient observation, as of the colors of the passing landscape. We, then, need not be debarred from the consideration of dress by any want of importance in the subject. We have more fear of the plea that dress, though not trivial in itself, is yet made up of trivialities, is so the product of sportive impulses, capricious feelings, and the vagaries of fashion, as to be, from the nature of the case, beyond the realm of reason, something which it is equally useless to attack or defend with sober, serious considerations. Certainly, no absurdities can plead more antiquity than those of dress, or have traveled through a more unending circuit. If folly can hold any kingdom by possession, surely this is that kingdom; and we feel that in bringing nothing better than reasons to the discussion of dress, we are at once ruled out of all, or almost all, the conclaves that now sit in deliberation on this theme. It is only to a few stupid male-minds, or to minds so allied to masculinity that they have never been touched by the electric forces that disport themselves in the brilliant, auroral fields of fashion, that we can hope to find access. This, however, is but another phase of the common misfortune, that we all speak and write for ourselves, and need not deter us from uttering one honest word so long as we believe in one honest man, or one so far honest as to be like ourselves. The first and chief utility of dress is shelter, and in reference to this end, that dress is evidently the best which affords it in the most complete manner, with the least restraint. In the form of garments prevalent with woman, the essential features, from which fashion with all its caprice refuses to depart, disregard both of these particulars. These first utilities are set at defiance, and dress is at once excessively burdensome, and excessively inadequate. Skirts at one time kept as far as possible from the person, at another allowed to wrap themselves most inconveniently about it, and at all times with a length as great as is consistent with any motion, answer decisively the question, how can the most embarrassment and the least service be secured with the largest expense of material? From the waist downward the show of dress and the substance of dress are almost entirely distinct. Under garments sufficient to secure warmth must be worn, and to these be added a cumbersome and unwieldy weight of material devoted to the eye only, and sadly interfering with the free enjoyment of one's active powers. No wonder that the crinoline skirt, reducing this theory of garments to its smallest terms, building up the lightest and largest frame-work of appearances above the substantial garments, was universally welcomed as a great reduction. of the evil. This is the fundamental fallacy in female dress, that the greater part of it furnishes but slight protection and imposes severe restrictions and unendurable burdens. How many ladies now walk our streets one hand exclusively devoted to support. The extent of this burden, nothing but familiarity, the stupid induration of custom, hides from us. The twenty or forty pounds of a soldier, snugly packed on his shoulders, can hardly afford so serious an obstacle to a day's march as the twenty or forty yards of silks and woolens and cottons in upper and under-skirts, in the midst of which a woman habitually walks. If we consider the embarrassment of motion, and the liability of soil, we think a yard of fine fabric in the one position quite the equivalent of a pound in the other, and thus one entire sex moves amid the pleasures and duties of life as burdened and beset with difficulties as when men make a forced march for their lives, and accepts this foolish ordinance of society as if it were a decree of heaven. In the woods, in the fields, on the paved street, how much of physical buoyancy and animal spirits, and thus of healthy and highest enjoyment, are sacrificed to a fashion for which no sound reason whatever can be given. That there is an incurable vein of folly in the race one is led to fear in reading medical advertisements, and in observing the servitude of dress. That woman should throw away half her birthright of physical liberty and free, open-air pleasures, for reasons so obscure and slight that no two can render them alike, is sufficient proof that our life is yet an underground stem, rooted in the darkness of irrational impulses, and only here and there creeping into the light. The Chinese foot, after all, is no eccentricity; it is rather the typical fact of fashion. It were well if this cumbersome out-rigging of dress were nothing more than a burden and superfluity. Some make a worse use of it than this, by insisting on regarding it as serviceable, and not providing adequate, independent under-garments for real warmth and shelter. Hence women, though more warmly dressed than formerly, are still less adequately clothed than men. The heavy sock, the sturdy boot, the double-thickness of the closest woolen fabrics, find no equivalents in a woman's garments. Delicate girls, who suffer most from exposure, are habituated to it in a form that would be intolerable to their rugged brothers. We need not urge the constraint and burden put upon the vital organs. Those who sacrifice the outer life will hardly spare the inner life, and to crowd and corner the one, and embarrass and perplex the other, trampling upon comfort and safety alike in the pursuit of some fanciful idea of beauty, have always been easy to those who have shared the intoxication, and felt the wild delirium of fashion. Only here and there has been found a mind sober enough to respect its own physical life, sound enough to guard its own pleasures, sensible enough to divine the beauty of health and strength. After protection and freedom, neatness, a wholesome reserve as regards contact and soil, would seem to be a cardinal quality of dress. Here the failure is no less conspicuons than in previous particulars, and is the more painful as all tidy qualities and cleanly devices take refuge from man's persecution under the sheltering hand of women. Alas for us when the Holy of Holies is less immaculate than the court of the Gentiles. What word can we use not too foul for language wherewith to express the condition of skirts that have swept up, mingled and stored away in their ample folds the filth, varying and manifold, of the streets! Moreover, this is an uncleanness of long standing. Says Chaucer of our ancestors of five hun dred years ago: "As to the firste sinne in superfluitie of clothing whiche that maketh it so dere to the harme of the peple, not only the coste of the embrowding, the desguising, endenting, or barring, ounding, paling, winding or bending, and semblable wast of cloth in vanitee; but ther is also the costlewe furring in hir gounes, so muche pounsoning of chesel to maken holes, so moche dagging of sheres, with the superfluitee in length of the foresaide gounes, trailing in dong and in the myre, on hors and eke on foot, as well of man as of woman, that all thilke trailing is veraily (as in effect) wasted, consumed, threadbare and rotten with dong, rather than it is yeven to the poure, to gret damage of the foresayd poure folk, and that in sundry wise: this is to sayn, the more that cloth is wasted, the more must it cost to the poure peple for the scarceness; and furthermore, if so be that they wolden geve swiche pounsoned and dagged clothing to the poure peple, it is not convenient to were for hir estate, ne suffisaint to bote hir necessitee to kepe hem fro the distemperance of the firmament." Women have been slower than men to accept the sober laws of taste falling to them as high and holy beings. It is now two hundred years since men, Englishmen, went abroad in all the colors of the rainbow. The male court butterfly was pinned up in our historic cabinet about the time of the Charleses, by the unsympathetic bayonet of the Puritan. Not only does every European capital present more or less of this spectacle, not even the peasant may work the fields, without, as she stoops to her task, dropping her half yard of calico, or serge, or drugget into the dirt at her feet. Custom has left her none of the amenities, nothing of the gentleness, no share of the respect of her sex; it is only faithful in transmitting to her this tyranny of dress. Having lost every one of the pleasant fruits of her bondage, she yet dare not touch or alter those conventional skirts, which, with no added decency, bring only weariness and filth. Chief among the annoyances of railroad travel is dust. A bright inventor conceived the idea of dropping on either side of the car a curtain or panel that should hold the dust under the vehicle, allowing its escape only at the rear. Looking around for a name under which to christen his invention, with a happy insight into analoogies, he termed it Salisbury's Petticoat Duster. Simplicity of parts, ease of construction and adjustment, would also seem to be secondary utilities in dress not to be overlooked. These minor qualities of good sensible garments have shared the fate of primary ones, and we have still "disguising, endenting, barring, winding, and bending." as in the days of Chaucer. Burdened by this superfluity of resources, we are yet in the condition long since announced: "I am an Englishman, and naked I stand here, For now I will wear this, and now I will wear that, The unsympathetic poet leaves our friend at this juncture. We know not whether he was ever able to dress himself. Notwithstanding the violence it does to our feelings, our opinion is he never was able. We look upon him, surrounded by so many and so diverse garments, as in the position of the famous hypothetical, metaphysical donkey, placed, between two bundles of hay, exactly equi-distant to the thousandth of an inch. He never could make up his mind which to choose, and perished by the equilibrium of motives, a martyr to philosophy. Philosophy has its martyrs; so, doubtless, did fashion in our English kinsman. The plea, when any is offered, under which this entire oversight of the ends of dress proceeds, is that of beauty. Woman, it is said, ought to adorn herself. Through her, chiefly, the delights and high indulgences of taste find access to the race. If she were to submit her garments to the somber utilities, the work-day conveniences of life, the more brilliant light and fascination of beauty would at once fade out of existence, and we should have made a few petty gains, gathered trifling crumbs of physical comfort, at the expense of most that is enlivening, bewitching and controlling in female character and social intercourse. If there were any real truth in this presentation; if fashion accorded with taste, though missing utility; if it wrought with beauty in society, then we would withdraw our criticism abashed. Quite the reverse is true. Our garments no more commend themselves to ingenuous, cultivated feeling than they do to plain, honest, common sense. This we shall try to show. In the first place, beauty, though not the same as utility, cannot be secured in defiance and rejection of it. That which neglects, in construction, the obvious uses for which it is made, is so far mon |