reat
laws of exercise, of respiration, of digestion are essentially the same
for all human beings; and greater sensitiveness in the patient should
not relax, but only stimulate, our efforts after cure. And the
unquestionable fact that there are among us, after the worst is said,
large numbers of robust and healthy women, should keep up our courage
until we can apply their standard to the whole sex.

In presence of an evil so great, it is inevitable that there should be
some fantastic theories of cure. But extremes are quite pardonable,
where it is so important to explore all the sources of danger. Special
ills should have special assailants, at whatever risk of exaggeration.
As water-cures and vegetarian boarding-houses are the necessary defence
of humanity against dirt and over-eating, so is the most ungainly
Bloomer that ever drifted on bare poles across the continent a
providential protest against the fashion-plates. It is probable, that,
on the whole, there is a gradual amelioration in female costume. These
hooded water-proof cloaks, equalizing all womankind,--these thick soles
and heavy heels, proclaiming themselves with such masculine emphasis
on the pavement,--these priceless india-rubber boots, emancipating all
juvenile femineity from the terrors of mud and snow,--all these indicate
an approaching era of good sense; for they are the requisite machinery
of air, exercise, and health, so far as they go.

The weight of skirts and the constraints of corsets are still properly
made the theme of indignant declamation. Yet let us be just. It is
impossible to make costume the prime culprit, when we recall what robust
generations have been reared beneath the same formidable panoply. For
instance, it seems as if no woman could habitually walk uninjured with a
weight of twelve pounds of skirts suspended at her hips,--Dr. Coale is
responsible for the statistics,--and as if salvation must therefore lie
in shoulder-straps. Yet the practice cannot be sheer suicide, when the
Dutch peasant-girl plods bloomingly through her daily duties beneath a
dozen successive involucres of flannel. So in regard to tight lacing,
no one can doubt its ill effects, since even a man's loose garments
are known to diminish by one-fourth his capacity for respiration. Yet
inspect in the shop-windows (where the facts of female costume are
obtruded too pertinaciously for the public to remain in ignorance)
the light and flexible corsets of these days, an