[Illustration: The pull-back of 1886.]

[Illustration: Fashionable walking costume early in the seventies.
Woman appreciating the fact "that it is her mission to be beautiful."
See page 405.]

[Illustration: Fashionable walking costume in the early sixties. Woman
appreciating the fact "that it is her mission to be beautiful." See
page 405.]

Such have been the inconsistencies, incongruities, and absurdities of
fashion as illustrated in the past three decades, in view of which one
may well ask whether in fashion's eyes women are such paragons of
ugliness that these ever-varying styles (introduced, we are seriously
informed, to conserve to her beauty,) are absolutely essential, and by
what rule of art can we explain the fact that the ponderous hoopskirt
was the essential requirement of beauty in the sixties and the
enormous bustles demanded in the seventies. The truth is, fashion is
supremely indifferent alike to all laws of art and beauty, health and
life, decency and propriety--a fact that must be patent to any
thoughtful person who examines the prevailing styles of a generation.
I submit that the wildest extremes to which well-meaning but
injudicious dress reformers have gone in the past have been marked by
nothing more inartistic than the costume of the reigning belle in
1860. Each successive decade has been marked by an extreme which,
surveyed from the vantage ground of the present, is as ridiculously
absurd as it has been wanting in beauty Nowhere have the laws of true
art been so severely ignored as in the realm of fashion. Yet this view
of the problem palls into insignificance when we come to examine the
question from the standpoint of health and life.

One would think that after thousands of years of sickness and death,
with all the advantages of increased education and a broadening
intellectual horizon, we would have arrived at such an appreciation of
the value of health and the solemn duty we owe to posterity, as to
compel this consideration to enter into our thoughts when we adopted
styles of dress; yet nowhere is the weakness of our present
civilization more marked or its hollowness so visible, even to the
superficial thinker, as in the realm of fashion, _where every
consideration of health and even of life, and all sense of
responsibility to future generations are brushed aside as trivialities
not to be seriously considered_. In vain have physicians and
physiologists written, lectured, and demonstrat